Copyright N°. 



COPYRIGHT Dl POSIT. 



THE TEST 




BOSTON 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 
1914 



Copyright, 1914 
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 



JUN 29 I3i4 

©CI.A376493 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Test 1 

II The Message of Micah .... 18 

III "What Think Ye of Christ?" . 32 

IV The Best Apologetic .... 42 
V Inspiration 55 

VI The Dreamers 72 

VII A Transparent World .... 83 

VIII The God of the Open .... 93 

IX Authority in Religion . . . .104 

X To an Unknown God . . . .120 



THE TEST 



" By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, 
if ye have love one to another." 

John xiii:35. 

The long shadows, sloping eastward, tell of 
the declining day. The cooling breeze begins 
to blow in from the sea, and the dusty flowers 
that dot the Syrian desert lift their heads as 
the moist fingers of the wind caress them. In 
a quiet place without the city, where the rumble 
of traffic reaches the ear only as a confused 
murmur, a Galilean peasant has gathered about 
him a little company of common folk, and is 
talking to them. He is speaking in the homely 
vernacular of the people, and they listen with 
wistful attention to the simple words that fall 
from his lips. There is no attempt at elo- 
quence or florid rhetoric. As gently as a shep- 
herd speaks to the lambs of his flock, this Gali- 
lean talks to the men and women who are 
clustered about him. 

It is a very ordinary lot of people who stand 
there, — just the common folk from the shop, 
and the field, and the bench, and the fishing- 
net. The poor, and the blind, and the sick are 

1 



2 



THE TEST 



there, side by side with the troubled, and the 
discouraged, and the sinful ; but while he speaks 
to them, the narrow walls of their little lives 
push out into the infinite, and the cares that 
infest the day are forgotten. He is talking 
about religion, a religion so simple that the 
wayfaring man, foolish though he be, need not 
err therein. It is a religious character, of what 
a man is in himself, rather than of what he be- 
lieves; a religion so broad that it makes a shrine 
of every loving heart, and life itself one mighty 
sacrament. Would anyone hunger and thirst 
after such a religion? It is not far to seek. 
There is no secret about it, known only to the 
initiated. " By this shall all men know that 
ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to an- 
other." Love one another. That is all. And 
as they listen to this new teaching, so different 
from that of the Scribes and Pharisees to which 
they had been accustomed, the heart of the 
people is filled with a new joy, the love which 
this Galilean peasant pours out upon them all 
alike seems to burn up every vestige of their 
meanness and their sin, and, when he has fin- 
ished and quietly gone his way, the people re- 
turn home with a strange spell upon them, and 
begin to live better lives. 

It is the fourteenth day of June, in the year 
325. Before a great building in the heart of 
Nicea, the second capital of Bithynia, is gath- 



THE TEST 



3 



ered a crowd of delegates to an important 
church council. A motley crowd it is, of all 
ages and tongues, each man shouting at the 
top of his voice, and enforcing his assertions 
by wild gesticulations. High above all others 
rise the shrill, piercing shrieks of a group of 
Egyptians, "brandishing their arguments Aike 
spears." There are between three and four 
hundred of these delegates, and with them is 
collected a mighty company of laymen and 
those drawn by curiosity and the howling babel 
of tongues. The doors of the building fly open, 
and the bishops, and presbyters, and deacons 
pour into the great hall, and arrange them- 
selves with much confusion on the benches pro- 
vided for them. In the center of the room, a 
small throne supports a copy of the Gospels, 
while at the far end of the hall a chair of state 
gleams and glistens in magnificent splendor. 
Suddenly the wrangling and the noisy discus- 
sion give place to a deep silence. There is a 
stir at the door. Gorgeously apparelled offi- 
cers of court move slowly down the aisle. A 
torch, swung solemnly by a cursor, lifts the 
audience to its feet. In the hush of expect- 
ancy, oppressive in its breathless intensity, 
there comes a sound of heavy footsteps, and, 
like a Greek god, towering of stature, strong- 
built and handsome, the Emperor Constantine 
strides down the long hall, dazzling the eyes of 



4 



THE TEST 



the simple with his regal state. In his long 
black hair is fastened a crown of shining pearls, 
and his purple robe, as he moves majestically 
down the great aisle, burns and glows with 
precious stones. Slowly he approaches the 
golden chair, and, as he seats himself upon it, 
the turmoil of debate, full of bitter invective 
and recrimination, belches forth. The Em- 
peror raises his hand for silence. He urges 
the council to remember that they are Chris- 
tian men, and to conduct themselves accord- 
ingly. But the ecclesiastics are keyed to a 
frenzy, and the fierce discussion breaks forth 
with renewed passion. Two words are shouted 
back and forth across the aisle, words which 
form the hoarse battle-cry of the opposing fac- 
tions : « HOMOOUSION ! " " HOMOIOU- 
SION ! " One party is yelling, " He is of the 
SAME substance!" The other howls back, 
" Nay, he is of LIKE substance ! " It is all 
about a little iota, the least letter in the whole 
Greek alphabet. So the war of tongues rages. 
After six weeks of wrangling, there issues forth 
from this gathering of representatives, a re- 
markable document, which is supposed to crys- 
tallize the true faith of the Christian church. 
It reads as follows: 

"We believe in one God, the Father Al- 
mighty, maker of all things, visible and invis- 
sible. 



THE TEST 



5 



" And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of 
God, begotten of the Father, the only begotten, 
i. e. of the very essence of the Father, God of 
God, and Light of Light, very God of very 
God, begotten, not made, being of one substance 
of the Father: by whom all things were made 
in heaven and on earth; who for us men, and 
for our salvation, came down and was incarnate 
and was made man; he suffered and the third 
day he rose again, ascended into heaven; from 
thence he shall come to judge the quick and 
the dead. 

" And in the Holy Ghost. 
" And those who say : there was a time when 
he was not ; and : he was not before he was 
made; and: he was made out of nothing, or 
out of another substance or thing, or that the 
Son of God is created or changeable or alter- 
able; they are condemned by the holy catholic 
and apostolic church." 

Then these bishops, and elders, and deacons 
went home, and using this Nicene Creed as a 
test of discipleship, they persecuted all who 
would not accept it — to the glory of God! 
From that day to this, the stress in religion has 
been shifted from the life to be lived to the creed 
to be believed. From that day to this, there 
have been two definitions of discipleship, the 
definition of Christianity and the definition of 
Jesus, — and the two touch at no single point. 



6 



THE TEST 



" When one reads the creed that was given by 
Jesus and the Creeds that have been made by 
Christians, he cannot fail to detect an immense 
difference, and it does not matter whether he 
select the Nicene Creed or the Westminster 
Confession." Were the Athanasian Creed and 
the simple statement of the Master printed in 
parallel columns, it would be hard to believe 
that both were intended to serve the same end, 
to be a basis of fellowship. He who accepts 
the Creeds may be an adherent of Christ, but 
only the man who loves is a disciple of Jesus, 
— and the two are not the same. 

" By this shall all men know that ye are my 
disciples, if ye have love one to another." 
Jesus arrived at his conception of love as the 
one thing at the heart o'f religion, after a 
process of growth and study. Brought up in 
the knowledge and observance of the thousand 
rules and regulations that had fastened them- 
selves like barnacles to the Tables of the Law, 
he had gradually emancipated himself from 
them, and had come to consider only the sub- 
stance of the Ten Commandments as of worth 
and weight. Later his position changed. He 
reduced the Ten Commandments to two. " A 
certain lawyer asked him a question, tempting 
him, Teacher, which is the great commandment 
of the law? And he saith unto him, Thou shalt 
love the Lord, thy God, with all thy heart, and 



THE TEST 



7 



with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This 
is the first and great commandment. And a 
second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself. On these two commandments 
hangeth the whole law and the prophets." 
This was a decided advance beyond the old 
ecclesiastical regime, with its multiform require- 
ments and its intricate network of outside ob- 
servances ; and had Jesus stopped there, he 
would have made a mighty contribution to the 
freeing of men from the thraldom of legalism. 
But as he thought the thing over in his own 
mind, as he sifted and weighed the various sym- 
bols and rites and theories, he came to a con- 
clusion which sets aside the whole system of 
ceremonial and theology which men had drawn 
about the religious idea. Even the two-fold re- 
quirement of love to God and love to men seems 
too complex for Jesus, so we find him, at the 
last, eliminating the one element which has been 
regarded by men everywhere as absolutely es- 
sential to any religion at all, and simplifying 
his creed until it contained a single, wonderfully 
explicit article: "This is my commandment, 
that ye love one another. By this shall all men 
know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love 
one to another." There is nothing about love 
to God in it. There is no demand that men 
should pour out their affections on an unseen 
Deity. That matter would take care of itself. 



s 



THE TEST 



Love one another. That was all there was to 
it. Love one another. That seemed to cover 
the whole field of human relationships. It is 
very clear and very simple, — till one tries to 
live it. 

There is something sublime in the courage of 
Jesus, as he stands there in the midst of the 
ritualists, and doctors, and schoolmen, and 
casuists of his time, and dares to risk his re- 
ligion to a single proposition. He sent his 
followers into the world with the simplest test 
that men ever assumed in order to determine 
their fellowship. " By this shall all men know 
that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one 
to another." Nothing more, — and nothing 
less. There is no catechizing of a man to find 
out what he believes concerning certain dogmas. 
Jesus did not seem to have much patience with 
the Scribes and Pharisees, with the legalists 
and formalists of the church of his day. A re- 
ligious man, to his way of thinking, was one who 
loved his fellowmen. It made little difference 
what his creed was, or his theological views. 
These things do not affect a man's life very 
much. But a man cannot love deeply with- 
out having it run up through every fiber of his 
character and flow out through every act. It 
is practically impossible to get men to think 
alike with reference to things that none of us 
know very much about, and where ignorance 



THE TEST 



9 



is supplemented by imagination and desire. 
But men can all love pretty much alike. The 
language of the heart, is one language the world 
over, and it does not require much mental cap- 
ital to understand it. When Jesus, then, based 
his religion on love, he changed the whole scheme 
of religious association, he broke down the the- 
ological partitions that separate men, tore away 
the division fences of dogma that run between 
the creeds, and gave men a bond of unity that 
goes down deep into human life. Religion? 
Love. It is just as simple as that. 

But even the apostles could not grasp the 
simplicity of Jesus' gospel. They must needs 
mix it with their old notions of sectarianism and 
warp it to their petty philosophies. Perhaps 
it is not strange that men who had inherited so 
much prejudice, and who had such a narrow 
outlook upon life, could not see a thing that 
was made so plain to them. The world seems 
to prefer mystery to simplicity. There is 
something alluring about the inscrutable. We 
are all prone to discount what we can under- 
stand and to go wandering after the occult. 
We want a leader who can mystify us, with 
miracles and incantations and signs. Religion 
is acceptable only when it masquerades in 
priestly superstitions and speaks in mumbling 
formulas out of some holy place or through the 
pages of some sacred book. We hunt dili- 



10 THE TEST 

gently for religion everywhere but in our own 
hearts. The man who gives himself to this or 
to that form of worship, or to this or to that 
institution, or to this or to that creed, may be 
religious, but he is not religious because of these 
things. According to Jesus, it is the man who 
loves who is religious. Wherever a man loves, 
be he Jew or Gentile, Mohammedan or Budd- 
hist, or a pagan without the pale of all the 
creeds, he is a disciple of Jesus, the lover of 

men. . , 

What a strange, mixed-up affair men have 
made of religion ! What began as a way of liv- 
ing became a " scheme of salvation." And be- 
cause we have been wont to identify religion 
with rites and ceremonies and sacraments, with 
these outside things that touch the inner life 
so slightly, this definition of Jesus appears in- 
adequate and altogether too simple. There is 
not enough of the smoke of the altar in it and 
the thundertones of the Terrible One; not 
enough of Westminster Abbey and the Council 
in the Jerusalem Chamber. It is full of the 
open air of the hills, and the breath of the sea, 
and the freedom of children. It lifts a man's 
soul out of the feverish arena where he has 
been struggling with words and phrases, with 
dogmas and doctrines, and says to him: 
« Never mind about those things. If you want 
to be a religious man, if you want to be a 



THE TEST 



11 



righteous man, the thing for you to do is to 
become a loving man. Do not worry over 
atonements and penalties and things of that 
sort. Just love one another. There is noth- 
ing better or higher than that." 

Jesus was talking about love, not sentiment* 
There is a vast difference between the two. 
Love is far deeper than sentiment. It gets 
down into the roots of life, below the passions 
and emotions. It is a constant quality, that 
does not need to be called forth by any lovable 
traits in the object toward which it is directed. 
It is not dependent on anything outside itself. 
Do you think that Jesus loved his disciples be- 
cause they were more attractive than other 
men, that crude, ignorant, wrangling crowd, 
with their petty and mistaken notions, and their 
poor little ambitions that did not reach beyond 
a place in some little municipal triumph that 
they supposed Jesus had come to set up in the 
world? Do you think that he loved them be- 
cause of anything he could see in them? The 
love of Jesus, any real love, is part of a man's 
being. The sun shines because its heart is 
afire. I do not need to bring my match and my 
bit of kindling whenever I want the sun to light 
and warm my garden. It beams, and glows, 
and pours out its splendor upon the earth, until 
there is not room enough to receive it, and it 
runs over the edges and drips off into bound- 



12 



THE TEST 



less space, — not because my few roses have 
roused its sleeping soul, but because it can't 
help shining, sunshine is the very utterance of 
its being. That is the way with love. It needs 
nothing to kindle it. It is spontaneous. It 
rays out of the heart like the sunshine, and falls 
on the evil and on the good alike. It is large- 
heartedness, — that is the word, — a heart big 
enough to see the divine possibility in every 
poor waif that struggles along in the sodden 
haunts of wretchedness and woe, big enough to 
get under it and help it up. 

Love idealizes its object. That is the ground 
of a man's faith and courage. Love dreams 
dreams, then sets about making the dreams come 
true. That was the inspiration of Jesus. He 
was keenly sensitive to the wickedness and de- 
pravity and hypocrisy of the people about him. 
No stain on the souls of men escaped his notice. 
But he had a supreme faith in manhood, and a 
vision. Over and above every poor, soiled frag- 
ment, he saw the thing it might be, the clean, 
white soul it might become. In the tattered 
bits of broken manhood and womanhood, he 
saw the prophecy of a divine wholeness that 
they were meant to have, and his love set it- 
self to work and bent under the world's burden, 
that the wounded, staggering feet of the mis- 
erable and sad might struggle upward toward 
the perfect. It was because he loved that he 



THE TEST 



13 



suffered. Love never faileth. It hopeth all 
things, believeth all things, endureth all things. 

No man can be truly religious, religious after 
the fashion of Jesus, and grow careless of the 
world's misery. No man can go down into the 
deeps of life and try to bear its stripes, and be 
anything less than a disciple of Jesus, though 
he may have never so much as heard of him. 
The organized religions of men may not ac- 
knowledge such a soul, but he bears branded on 
his body the marks of his Master. I sometimes 
think there is nothing in life quite so dreadful 
as the indifference of fashionable people to the 
cry of the outcast and uttermost. The social 
world goes on with its butterfly frivolities, its 
pitiful and puttering inanities, while the souls 
and bodies of its brethren and sisters rot in 
the slums, and no man careth for them. It 
parades up and down the aisles of our churches 
and kneels with much display at the altar, and 
thinks to have " done its religion," while its 
ears are deaf to the dropping of tears and its 
soul hard to the breaking of hearts. It chants 
its creed and recites its prayers, and goes away 
with much complacency, deeming that it has 
done God's service, but it hears not the voice 
that comes cutting through the atmosphere of 
pretense and hypocrisy : " I was an hungered, 
and ye gave me no meat; naked, and ye clothed 
me not. I was athirst and ye gave me no 



14) THE TEST 

drink; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me 
not . . . Verily, verily, I say unto you, inas- 
much as ye did it not unto one of these least, 
ye did it not unto me." 

Said Christ our Lord, " I will go and see ^ 
How the men, my brethren, believe in me.' 
So he passed not again through the gates of birth, 
But made himself known to the children of earth. 

Then said the chief priests, and rulers, and kings, 
" Behold, now, the Giver of all good things; 
Go to, let us welcome with pomp and state 
Him who alone is mighty and great." 

With carpets of gold the ground they spread 

Wherever the Son of Man should tread, 

And in palace-chambers lofty and rare 

They lodged him, and served him with kingly fare. 

Great organs surged through arches dim 
Their jubilant floods in praise of him; 
And in church, and palace, and judgment hall, 
He saw his image high over all. 

But still, wherever his footsteps led, 
The Lord in sorrow bent down his head, 
And from under the heavy foundation-stones, 
The son of Mary heard bitter groans. 

And in church, and palace, and judgment hall, 
He marked great fissures that rent the wall, 
And opened wider and yet more wide 
As the living foundation heaved and sighed. 



1 



THE TEST 



15 



" Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then, 
On the bodies and souls of living men? 
And think ye that building shall endure, 
Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor? 

" With gates of silver and bars of gold 

Ye have fenced my sheep from their Father's fold; 

I have heard the dropping of their tears 

In heaven these eighteen hundred years." 

" Oh, Lord and Master, not ours the guilt, 
We build but as our fathers built; 
Behold thine images how they stand 
Sovereign and sole through all the land. 

" Our task is hard, — with sword and flame 
To hold thine earth forever the same, 
And with sharp crook of steel to keep 
Still, as thou leftest them, thy sheep." 

The Christ sought out an artisan, 
A low-browed, stunted, haggard man, 
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin 
Pushed from her faintly want and sin. 

These he set in the midst of them, 
And as they drew back their garment's hem 
For fear of defilement, " Lo, here," said he, 
" The images ye have made of me ! " 

Religion has been too largely confined to 
energy that runs in vertical lines. It has been 
regarded as something that has to do with God 



16 THE TEST 

and the individual. But Jesus took these ver- 
tical lines and bent them till they ran hori- 
zontally, and made religion a relationship be- 
tween the individual and his f,ellowman. Jesus 
did not seem to care much for sacraments. He 
stood for service. He was not careful for 
litanies, but for life. 

A writer in a recent number of the Hibbert 
Journal raises the question whether it is not 
time to abandon Christianity, and substitute 
something else in its place. I do not know but 
that the plan is a good one. We do not need 
Christianity any more. It cannot meet the 
wants of the present day. For ages Christ has 
been, and Jesus has been lost sight of. For 
ages men have come to our theological mas- 
ters and said, like the Greeks of old, " Sirs, we 
would see Jesus," and instead of setting forth 
the simple Galilean, these masters have paraded 
their metaphysical Christ, their dogmatic lay- 
figure in place of the living lover of men. It 
is not the Christ that men want to see, nor any 
fictitious system builded thereon, but they 
would see the Man Jesus, and join the ranks 
of the great-hearted. Give men the vision they 
ask for,— the vision of a great, sympathetic 
human heart, on fire with love and quivering 
with life, the vision of one whose aim and whose 
agony of effort were to make the world better 
and who believed steadfastly in human possi- 



THE TEST 



17 



bility ; give men a glimpse of the most winsome 
personality that ever walked the highways of 
our common life, let them see him, stripped of 
the ecclesiastical millinery in which he has been 
for so long paraded before the world and re- 
leased from the fetters in which theology has 
so long shackled him, and men will crowd after 
him, for he will stand to them as a mighty in- 
spiration and as a never-failing hope. Yes, let 
us have something in the place of Christianity. 
I would suggest the simple religion of Jesus. 
66 By this shall all men know that ye are my 
disciples, if ye have love one to another. 55 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 



"What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do 
justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy 

^ 0C *' Micah vi:8. 

This young man had formed the commend- 
able, but rather dangerous, habit of doing his 
own thinking. He stood up before the crystal- 
lized conservatism of his church, with its petty 
proprieties and its mechanical observances, and 
began to ask questions. When a man begins 
to ask questions in theological matters, it is a 
sure sign that something is going to happen. 
The church loves to dogmatize, but it is al- 
ways a little impatient of cross-examination. 
It does not take kindly to the interrogation 
point. But any system of thought that bids 
for the respect of men, must be reasonable be- 
fore it can be credible. It may not be physic- 
ally demonstrable, but it dare not be irrational. 
The reasonableness of every philosophy is 
tested by questioning it. But the questions 
must be fair, sane, and in good faith. If we 
hold that the universe, both, physically and 
morally, is a rational universe, then the demand 
' 18 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 19 



for a rational explanation of all its phenomena 
is a legitimate demand. Moreover, if a knowl- 
edge of the truth is desirable, the search for 
it should be safe and the telling of it secure. 
Yet the church, in every age, has exalted her 
own mouth-pieces above the prophets, the seers 
are driven forth, while the Scribes and Pharisees 
of a stilted and narrow orthodoxy sit in the 
seats of honor. 

In the little village of Moresheth, on the 
maritime plain of Judea, not so far inland that 
the western winds lost the fresh smell of the 
sea, there lived one of these seers, a ques- 
tioner, a truth-seeker and a truth-teller. 
The scholars of the world have written his 
name among the humbler men who have tried 
to be honest with their time, in their thinking 
and in their preaching. He was only a minor 
prophet, but he had gotten hold of a major 
truth; and having gotten hold of a truth, he 
was brave enough to tell it to his age. He did 
not say much that the centuries have considered 
worth preserving, but he spake one word to the 
world, that outlines a programme big enough to 
keep it busy to the end of time. It was a word 
out of his own experience, a message plucked 
from the heart of the life about him. He saw 
the gorgeous ritual, the pomp and the tinsel, 
the spectacular display with which the church 
of his day was trying to cover its spiritual 



20 



THE TEST 



nakedness and moral poverty. The chants of 
the priests were ringing in his ears, and the 
smoke of the altars and the reek of swinging 
censers filled his nostrils. Formal religion 
seemed everywhere at its best. The temple 
courts were "filled with worshipers, and the ap- 
pointments of religious ceremonial were ob- 
served with scrupulous correctness. But the 
voung Micah was not deceived. He knew, as 
we of to-day know, that the church may grow 
in numbers, increase its gifts, multiply its bene- 
factions and extend its machinery, while the 
heart of it is hostile to, or at least negligent 
of, the true spirit of religion. He saw the op- 
pression under which the people groaned. He 
saw men who prided themselves on their ortho- 
doxy, praying to God and preying on their 
fellow-men with equal zeal. He saw the miser- 
able cant and hypocritical piety that trampled 
the temple aisles on the Lord's day, and trampled 
upon the bodies and souls of men the other days 
of the week. The hollowness of it all, the sham 
and falsehood of this counterfeit religion, stirred 
the heart of Micah to the very bottom. That 
is not religion at all, he asserted, and then he 
began to ask questions. " What is it that God 
expects of a man? Is it this sort of thing? 
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and 
bow myself before the most high God? Will 
the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 21 



or with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I 
give my first-born for my transgression, the 
fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" 
What is it that God wants? Does he want 
ceremonies, observances, rituals, ecclesiastical 
rites ? Does he want things? Or does he want 
men? These questions go right to the root of 
the matter. They cut down to the very founda- 
tions of religion. They strip away the husks 
of it, and the rubbish, and get at its kernel. 

Micah answers his own question. What is it 
that God expects of a man? " He hath shewed 
thee, 0 man, what is good; and what doth the 
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? 55 
It was equivalent to saying : " You are a ra- 
tional being. You have a conscience. You 
know what is right and what is wrong. Now 
then, God expects you to be a kind of man, not 
a mere religious mummer. He expects you to 
be the kind of a man that your own sense of 
right and wrong tells you that you ought to 
be. He expects you to be a square man, a lov- 
ing man, a man who shapes his life by a firm 
faith in a moral order of things." It is simple 
enough, this creed of the young prophet, but 
it looms large when you come to put it into 
practice. And that is where the value of a 
creed is measured. There may be longer state- 
ments of faith, and doctrinal formulas that read 



22 



THE TEST 



better, but the only creed that is worth a live 
man's while, is a creed that can be worked up 
into life. The important thing about any con- 
fession of faith is not how much of it can be 
believed, but how much of it can be lived. 
Truth is not an end in itself. It is a good 
thing to know the truth, but it is not enough. 
The end of truth is being. Religion, there- 
fore, cannot be measured in degrees of credu- 
lity. This young prophet had learned that. 
To him religion was a matter of common sense. 
He does not set a man in front of a catechism 
or creed. He sets him squarely in front of a 
life, a definite, tangible, every-day sort of a 
life. He does not propose a set of formulated 
opinions, and say, " Believe that ! " He sets up 
a type of character, a standard of conduct, and 
says, " Live that." There is no vagueness or 
ambiguity about it. There is no room for con- 
troversy. A man is not asked to believe some- 
thing that he may or may not be able to as- 
sent to; but he is asked to be something that 
every bit of manhood in him tells him is the 
thing he ought to be. There is a virile re- 
ligion, a fibrous, sturdy religion, with blood in 
it. There is a religion that challenges all a 
man's best. And look at the simplicity of it. 
To this young questioner, burrowing with re- 
lentless insight down to the very root of the 
thing, religion was no mere adjunct of life, — 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 23 



it was life itself. It was no exotic to be cod- 
dled and cared for in some cloister, apart from 
the stress of the multiform forces out of which 
human experience is woven; it was not some- 
thing too tender to be planted out where the 
life of men has to be lived and the endless strug- 
gle for existence goes on. Not that! But a 
resolute facing of the day's work, a sturdy 
trudging along the way where duty leads, an 
open heart for one's fellow-men and a humble 
devotion to one's highest ideals. That sums it 
all up, and when a man is living thus, when a 
man is so ordering his character and conduct 
that they will bear the plummet of rectitude, 
when he is meeting, so far as he understands 
them, the demands made upon him as a social 
unit, when he is true to the best he knows, that 
man is a religious man. I do not care what 
tag may be fastened to his theology, he may be 
Protestant or Catholic, Jew, Pagan, Moham- 
medan, Buddhist, or what not, but just so far 
as he is making his life straight and loving and 
sensitive to fine moral ideals, he is God's kind 
of a man, however much the Scribes and Phar- 
isees of formal ecclesiasticism refuse to recog- 
nize him. 

When we come to the last analysis of it, re- 
ligion cannot be measured except in terms of 
character and conduct. This is simply an- 
other way of saying that religion cannot be 



THE TEST 



separated from life. Profession and opinion 
count for little. Formal religion is of no value 
whatever, save as it becomes the expression of 
an inward spirit. A thousand rams and ten 
thousand rivers of oil are no substitute for clean 
hands and a pure heart. Prayer and praise 
in the sanctuary have no virtue in themselves. 
" Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, 
shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he 
that doeth the will of my Father which is in 
heaven." The fruit of religion is right ac- 
tion. Ceremonies and observances are of worth 
only as they help us to live finer lives. They 
cannot take the place of them. No amount of 
belief in a system of theology or confession of 
faith is any equivalent for righteousness. The 
cross of Jesus was no mere make-shift to en- 
able God to be less than just. It was no divine 
subterfuge through which God could call black 
white, and reckon a man as righteous, when he 
knew, and the man himself knew, that it was 
not true. Nay, when Jesus cried out to the 
men of his time: " Take up thy cross and fol- 
low me ! " he was summoning them to a kind of 
life. He was not offering a substitute for it. 
Jesus never offered to be righteous for any 
body. He tried to get men to be righteous for 
themselves, — which is the only kind of right- 
eousness worth having. He was not trying to 
devise some scheme whereby a righteousness not 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 25 



their own should be imputed to men. He was 
striving to get men to be righteous, not merely 
reckoned so. 

To believe in God is to believe enough in good 
to build our lives out of it. To follow Jesus 
is to get about the business of living as he did. 
To serve God is to do our day's work honestly, 
lovingly, and in a divine spirit. That is the 
true religion, the sanctification of the common 
task and daily toil, the glorifying of our com- 
mon-place relationships, — to do right, to be 
kind, to walk in the light of the eternal verities. 
There is a whole mine of truth in the crude 
preachment of one of our Western cowboys, 
who was trying to illustrate his idea of re- 
ligion. " It's this a-away," said he. " I 
works fer Jim, here. Well, s'pose I sits around 
the ranch-house from mornin' till night, singin' 
Jim's praises, tellin' what a good feller Jim is, 
an' how much Jim's did fer me and what I hopes 
Jim's goin' to do fer me by an' by, — why, 
that ain't servin' Jim ! But when I gits out and 
rustles Jim's bunch o' cattle, an' sees they gits 
their feed and water reg'lar, and don't let 'em 
git losted none, and takes care of the sick ones, 
I reckon I'm servin' Jim jest about the way Jim 
wants to be served." Have I not read some- 
where that " pure religion, and undefiled, be- 
fore God and the Father, is this: to visit 
the widows and the fatherless in their afflic- 



gg THE TEST 

tion, and to keep himself unspotted from the 
world?" 

We are oftentimes affronted by the very sim- 
plicity of great moral facts. For some reason 
or other, we get the notion that the most po- 
tent forces must be attended by more or less 
pomp and display. When Naaman, the leper, 
would be healed at the hands of the prophet, 
he was nigh to missing the blessing because he 
resented the simplicity of the method by which 
he was to secure it. The prophet did not even 
go to see him, but sent his servant with a single 
word: "Go wash in the Jordan!" But Naa- 
man was wroth, and went away, and said: 
" Behold, I thought he will surely come out to 
me and stand, and call on the name of his God, 
and strike his hand over the place and recover 
the leper ! " There is a lingering desire in all 
of us for the dramatic. A religion that comes 
to us in every-day clothes we are a little shy 
of. We get our ideas of religion confused with 
temples, and smoking altars, and incense, and 
solemn litanies. But a religion for common 
men must be so simple that the least of us can 
understand it and the lowliest of us can get 
hold of it. For the important thing in the 
world is not religion, but men. And religion 
is to make men. It has no other purpose. The 
great God is not worrying about his paltry 
meed of praise and worship. The everlasting 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 27 



Father is no Haman at the gate, insisting on 
his nod of recognition from every passer-by. 
Religion is not a duty. It is an opportunity. 
It is not something to make us right with an 
angry God. It is something to bring us to the 
fullness of our divine possibility as children of 
God. Paul caught the idea when he wrote to 
the men of Ephesus: "And he gave some, 
apostles ; and some, prophets ; and some, evange- 
lists ; and some, pastors and teachers; for the 
perfecting of the saints, for the work of the 
ministry, for the building up of the body of 
Christ; till we all attain ... a full-grown 
manhood." That is it. The whole aim and 
end of religious systems, and of religious teach- 
ing, and of religious service is the making of 
men. And the man is more than any system, 
or creed, or ritual. 

Religious forms, then, are simply incidental. 
To make them the essential element is to miss 
the central point of it all. What doth God re- 
quire of thee? To do justly, to love mercy and 
to walk humbly with thy God, — to be a certain 
kind of man, to live a certain kind of life. 
Temples, ceremonials, litanies, worship, what- 
ever in the systems of religious organization 
may aid in becoming this kind of a man and 
in living this kind of a life, claim your al- 
legiance, but only so far as they do contribute 
to these ends. They do not exist for them- 



28 



THE TEST 



selves. The most gorgeous ritual and the most 
solemn ceremonies are as nothing, if, as we 
leave the altars and face the world's work again, 
righteousness, and love, and spirituality are not 
the dominant notes in our life. It is all vanity, 
this playing at religion, if the great end for 
which any true religion strives is lost sight of. 
No man has done what is required of him when 
he has joined a church, when he attends its 
stated worship, and when he has contributed to 
its financial needs. It is only when he is be- 
coming more of a man, truer in his daily life, 
broader in his human sympathies, more sensi- 
tive in his conscience, more alive to the great 
spiritual forces, that he is meeting the divine 
demands upon him. Neither church nor creed 
can take the place of character. Pious senti- 
ment and theological acumen are not of neces- 
sity virtues. We judge trees by the fruit on 
them, not by their leaves, and we judge men 
by their day-book and ledger, not by their 
prayers and professions. 

Does it seem too simple, this statement of 
the prophet Micah? It may be simple — any 
religion that would be universal must be simple, 

but it provides just the moral tonic that 

the world needs in these days. If ever there 
was a time when something was needed to de- 
velop a higher standard of public and private 
integrity, that time is now. If ever there was 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 29 



a day when men needed to be taught the value 
of the basic virtues, that day is now. Our 
whole life is eaten with dishonesty and debased 
by graft. The moral standards by which every 
man should test his living in public and in pri- 
vate action have become warped and false. 
The one question which ought to determine the 
moral quality of our acts and enterprises, the 
question, Is this thing right? has been elbowed 
aside by the question, What is there in it for 
me? The dominant desire of the day seems 
to be to have rather than to be. We are given 
to estimating men by what they have heaped 
about them, instead of by what they have de- 
veloped within them. We measure our own suc- 
cess in life, not in terms of character, but in 
so many square feet of dirt, in so much brick, 
and mortar, and stone, and stocks, and bonds, 
and a thousand other things that the grave will 
strip from us. You cannot measure the value 
of a man in things. You cannot figure a man's 
worth anywhere save at the point where he be- 
comes a man. You are worth no more than can 
be expressed, than is expressed, in the qualities 
that make for manhood. 

If the world needs any one thing to-day more 
than another, it is to lay hold vitally on this 
simple creed of the prophet Micah; to get it 
bedded in its conscience that the great God is 
seeking honest, loving, spiritually minded men, 



30 THE TEST 

rather than worshipers, or pietists, or creed- 
mongers, or theological doctors. And the 
world needs, too, to revise its own standard of 
measurement, so that every man shall be rated 
according to the mind and heart and soul of 
him, and not by his bank account. The man 
is what he is, not what he has. Wealth is simply 
condensed opportunity. Its value lies in its 
use, not in its possession. To heap up riches 
is to multiply one's power to affect his com- 
munity for good or evil. Where power is, 
there is responsibility. We hear much in these 
days about tainted money. Money has no 
moral quality. It cannot be tainted. The 
most serious 'thing in our present age is not 
tainted money, but tainted men, men who se- 
cure money through bad means, men who are 
willing to secure it at the expense of rectitude, 
mercy, and conscience. 

We want a new evangelism, an evangelism 
that comes down out of the clouds and mists 
and walks our streets ; an evangelism that stops 
whimpering about some far-off heaven and gets 
about the daily pursuits of life with healing 
power! We want a new salvation, a salvation 
that saves, a salvation that takes hold of all 
that a man has, his business, his home, his pol- 
itics, and purines them; a salvation that does 
not wait for some other life before it is effec- 
tive ; a salvation that is directed toward making 



THE MESSAGE OF MICAH 31 



this life the best kind of a life possible in any 
world. We need a new conception of religion, 
a conception that does not exhaust itself in 
seeking adherents to a particular church, or in 
conformity to a particular creed, but that aims 
at making God-fearing, humanity-looking, high- 
minded, right-souled citizens, here and now. 
We need a religion whose energy and effort are 
aimed at making men, clean, pure men, whose 
days and nights can bear the light of investiga- 
tion; men who dare to live in the open, and 
who do not sneak behind creeds or crosses to 
hide their sins or to justify their meannesses; 
men who do not need to be bribed by offers of 
heaven before they are willing to be decent on 
earth; men who live every day in the light of 
their divine responsibilities. That is the re- 
ligion we want. It grips hold of human life. 
It meets us on the plane where men live. It 
chimes in with the noise of traffic and the hum 
of industry. There is blood, and bone, and 
gristle in it. It is full of fine, large strength. 
It is the sort of a religion that lays hold of 
the best there is in us. It makes men of us. 
There is no appeal either to fear or to selfish- 
ness. It changes the summons of the old 
evangelism, " Come, and be saved," and rings 
out a new summons, " Come, and be men ! " 



"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? " 



Matt. xxii:42. 

The most pathetic figure of all recorded his- 
tory is that of Jesus of Nazareth. It is not 
the poverty and friendlessness of his life that in- 
vests it with pathos. There have been many 
just as poor and just as forsaken as Jesus. 
It was not the apparent failure of his mission 
and the slow response of the dull world to his 
message. Many a preacher has met the same 
shriveling chill as he has worn out his life for 
his people. Nor was it the death on the cross, 
with all its pain and suffering. Many have 
died on the cross, and there have been multi- 
tudes of men who have passed through periods 
of agony compared with which the anguish of 
the crucifixion was trivial. None of these things 
contribute materially to the sorrow of the Son 
of Man. But to live in the heart of life as a 
man among men, meeting its temptations^ with 
courage and bearing its trials with fortitude, 
and then to be denied the fruit of the whole hard 
struggle by being looked upon as a god mas- 
querading in human guise; to walk the dusty 
* 32 



"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST?" 33 



highways of human experience, a common work- 
man traveling afoot through time, overcoming 
the ills that flesh is heir to, with no help but 
such as any other son of man might have, and 
then to see his life robbed of the grandeur of 
its moral simplicity, that it might be decked 
out in the tinsel and trappings of theological 
figment ; to glory in his humanness and then to 
be paraded as the only begotten Son of God; 
to insist on being the servant of his brethren, 
and yet to be set on thrones and made to lord 
it over them as king; to have the sweetness of 
his kindly religion turned to acid for the brand- 
ing of heretics; to see the light of his gospel 
changed to darkness by being overlaid with the 
thick curtain of an ecclesiastical Christology; 
to proclaim the free access of all men every- 
where to the presence of the Father-God, and 
then to be made a barred and bolted gateway 
to the kingdom of heaven; to be compelled to 
stand for what his soul loathed, and made 
sponsor for things that were hateful to him ; to 
see the foundations of the simple faith he held 
and taught perverted into credal barriers, while 
the emphasis in religion was laid upon things 
of no moral moment, — this it is which makes 
the figure of Jesus so profoundly pathetic. 

The supreme task of the present age is the 
rescue of Jesus from the hands of his friends. 
"What think ye of Christ?" is the question 



34. THE TEST 

that is pressing into the consciousness of 
thoughtful men, who are tired of the quibbling 
of the schools, and would come out from them 
all, into the fair open, where they may judge 
for themselves what manner of man he was, and 
what he stood for in the world. " Time was," 
says Professor Foster, " when, at the mention 
of the name of Jesus, many thought of church 
doctrine, of Christology, dogma, the old creed, 
which lay like a veil upon the personality of 
Jesus ; they thought of the veil, of the wrap- 
pings woven by speculation, of the deity; of 
the ' conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the 
Virgin Mary ' ; of resurrection, descent into hell, 
ascent into heaven ; of a return on the clouds ; 
of miracle upon miracle ; of the whole church be- 
lief in its massive formation with its material- 
ism and its magic ! To-day we live in a world 
characterized by nothing so much as by the 
absence of any psychological soil in which these 
fantasies can find nourishment. If these things 
constitute the Christian religion, that religion 
is already an antiquated affair, a relic that is 
worthless to the cultivated classes." The dog- 
mas about the Christ signify for many of the 
children of our time a gigantic and gilded 
tomb for the personality of Jesus and his re- 
ligion, sealed with stone of orthodoxy, before 
which the age waits for the sign of the living 
Master. 



"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? " 35 



Little by little historical criticism has done 
its work. In no spirit of antagonism to any 
faith or to any creed, but actuated only by a 
profound desire for the truth, rather than for 
a truth, the scholarship of to-day has sifted 
evidence and weighed testimony, and has given 
to the world the results of its investigation. 
With clear vision, unbiased by any precon- 
ceived notion, it has pierced the dust and mold 
of theological accumulation, and has given us a 
glimpse of the original painting that lay be- 
neath. It has scraped away the false color- 
ing of later ages, by which ecclesiastics at- 
tempted to heighten effects with splotches of 
dogma, and has patiently removed the fictitious 
overlay of miracle that had fouled the portrait. 
With reverent fingers criticism is still laboring 
that men may see Jesus as he was; and if, as 
the work progresses, one after another of the 
fictions which have been clustered about the life 
of Jesus is dispelled and abandoned, yet the 
luster of his spirit is in nothing dimmed 
thereby, and he still remains the " light of the 
world." Jesus the magician has gone, but 
Jesus the Man grows ever larger on the world's 
vision. 

It is objected that the critical spirit of the 
age is destructive, that it is bent on tearing 
down the cherished idols that have long decked 
the hearthstone of multitudes of good men and 



36 



THE TEST 



women, leaving them nothing in its place. I 
am willing to admit that the first charge is well- 
founded. Criticism must be destructive, first 
of all. It must clear a broad place and take 
away the heaps of rubbish, before it can con- 
struct anything there. Until quite recently, 
the work of critical scholarship has been al- 
most wholly negative. But here and there the 
task of construction has been undertaken, and 
the building of a positive belief is well under- 
way. As to the second charge, that criticism is 
hostile to the orthodox faiths and determined 
to overthrow them, that I do not admit. Crit- 
icism knows no creed. It favors none and it 
fights against none. It seeks for truth. And 
if, in its search for truth, it finds it necessary 
to break some long-cherished image around 
which the thoughts of men have clung, its pity 
for the ignorance of men cannot stay the hand 
that severs them from their idols. If we are 
honest men we cannot ask criticism to limit the 
field of its research. If what we have long re- 
garded as truth turns out, under the keener 
inspection of skilled men, to be false, or only 
partially true, we should be willing to let it 
go. All we ask of the critic is that he be fair, 
and that he be gentle. And we should bear in 
mind also that though our theories concerning 
facts be changed, and modified and abandoned 
again and again, the facts themselves are not 



"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? " 37 



altered thereby. And further, however much 
the findings of the critics may modify our views 
of Jesus, and correct our wrong impressions of 
his person and his work, nevertheless he remains, 
fine and sweet and winsome as ever; and the 
verdict rendered by Pilate long ago concern- 
ing him, is the verdict of the modern critic, " I 
find no fault in this man. 55 

The attitude of the Unitarian church toward 
Jesus of Nazareth has been much misunder- 
stood and more often misrepresented. There 
could scarcely be a slur cast upon our position 
more false and misleading than the remark fre- 
quently made that the " Unitarian Church has 
in it no place for Jesus. 55 Let it be under- 
stood now and for all time that, among all 
those who are trying to follow the footsteps of 
the Nazarene, we claim the right to the front 
rank in the vanguard of the faithful. We hail 
him as the mightiest leader of men in the moral 
warfare of life, and we honor him by no specious 
lip-service, by no cowardly cringing behind his 
personality in order to escape the just conse- 
quences of our sins, but we pay him the homage 
of lives consecrated to the moral ideals that he 
sought to realize and to the spirit that burned 
in the soul of him. It is true that there is no 
room in the Unitarian Church for the meta- 
physical Christ of the schools, for the abstract 
creation of ecclesiasticism, who stands for a 



38 



THE TEST 



term in a syllogism, a theological formula, a 
mechanical substitute for human effort ; but no 
creed can reverence more profoundly the sweet 
reasonableness, the high purposes, and the 
splendid outlook upon life, the moral grip and 
the religious temper of this Jewish peasant, who 
trod the Galilean hills and spent himself in the 
effort to lead men to righteousness. ^ For the 
Christ of the scholastics, the majestic figment 
of Paul and the logicians, the Unitarian Church 
has little use, but the simple Teacher of the 
Syrian fisher-folk commands our reverence and 
our tears. The beauty of his life appeals to a 
Unitarian as it cannot appeal to any other. It 
stands forth as an earnest of what the least 
man of us can become, and an inspiration that 
nerves us in our struggle with wrong, and in- 
justice, and sin. The victory of this humble 
Nazarene over himself, his triumph over every 
mean ambition, his conquering of all that was 
base and less than his best, without any out- 
side help but such as we too may have, quickens 
our lagging courage, fires our fainting heart, 
and sends us forth to the battle again with a 
brave song on our lips. There is a strength in 
the character of Jesus for those of us who look 
upon him as purely human, which is denied to 
those who regard him as a god in human form. 
The moment you make Jesus something other 
than a complete man, the moment you add to 



"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST?" 39 



him one solitary equipment that the least soul 
of us does not and cannot possess, that moment 
you lift him out of correspondence with human 
experience and break all vital connection with 
the race. If Jesus be God coming into our 
life, clothed with our flesh and blood, as the 
theologians claim, what does that fact benefit 
us, who, with no wealth of infinite power to fall 
back on, must fight the fight with naked fists 
and take the beatings of the world on our own 
naked nerve-pulps? What does it matter that 
God has borne the yoke of human limitation 
and met the problems of human life? Anyone 
could do that if he were a God. It does not in- 
spire us to see how a God might live in human 
form. The perspective of all our problems is 
altered mightily when there is an affinity of 
power and wisdom behind them. It is not hard 
for a God to live like a man, with all the divine 
resources back of him. That is of little in- 
terest to us. But how to live like a God, with 
only a man's chance in the world, how to be 
divine in the midst of all the pettiness of daily 
drudgery, how to hold fast to our integrity in 
the presence of a thousand insinuating tempta-* 
tions, how to be pure and clean in the center of 
earth's soiling and defiling influences, — these 
are the problems that face us, and for which we 
need to have our souls girded and our spirits 
strengthened. 



40 



THE TEST 



There is a tremendous uplift in the thought 
of Jesus as bone of our bone and flesh of our 
flesh. When we look upon him as a man, not 
as " mere man," as the orthodox love to taunt 
us with saying — there is nothing belittling in 
the expression — when we look upon Jesus as 
man, stripping off the tawdry raiment of the- 
ological speculation and exalting the true di- 
vinity of manhood, there is awakened in every 
human breast a newer and higher ideal of hu- 
man possibility and we see our common life 
glorified, with such a splendor at the heart of it 
that even the trivial and the commonplace are 
transfigured with a divine beauty. It is man 
ascending into heavenly places that draws the 
race after him. The supreme exaltation of hu- 
manity is the magnetic force that grips our 
souls. 

To us Unitarians, Christmas is a season of 
renewed powers and of quickened ideals. It 
marks the birthday of no God. It stands for 
the incarnation of no strange and unearthly 
spirit. We see no heavens opening and hear 
no chorus of angelic voices hailing the coming 
of the only-begotten of God. But out of the 
heart of our common humanity, we welcome one 
like unto ourselves, who shows us how to live 
these little lives of ours as a man ought to live 
them. We see one who stood in the midst of 
the world, where all the winds of temptation 



"WHAT THINK YE OF CHRIST?" 41 



blew upon him, meeting poverty, and sorrow, 
and hatred, and misunderstanding, the same old 
trials that we all have to meet, yet through them 
all living a sweet, clean, joyful life, and show- 
ing us that even in untoward conditions such a 
life can be lived by every one of us. And as 
we gaze upon the character of the human Jesus, 
there comes upon us all the inspiration that is 
diffused from all great souls, we grip our lives 
with a fine new strength, we grapple our fate 
with an unconquerable spirit, and we go on to 
whatever the days hold for us, with an un- 
dimmed faith in the might of our own manhood, 
as he has revealed it to us. 



THE BEST APOLOGETIC 

If, a generation or two ago, we had been 
called upon to give a proof of Christianity, we 
would have at once appealed to two things upon 
which the Christian religion was supposed to 
rest: miracle and prophecy. These were the 
pillars upon which the faith of men was solidly 
set, and which could not be moved without de- 
stroying the whole structure. It is a poor 
policy to support the integrity of a system 
upon what is incidental rather than vital. It 
necessitates awkward explanations and a rapid 
shifting of positions when the test comes In 
modern thought both miracles and prophecy 
are absolutely discredited, and Christianity has 
been compelled to look elsewhere for standmg 

gr We d are living in a world governed by law, 
an orderly world, where nothing « walks with 
aimless feet," but where all things are gripped 
and held fast by an inexorable law of conse- 
quence. For everything that happens there 
is a reason. There is nothing spasmodic, or 
causeless, or independent in the universe 
Every phenomenon is the result of a cause, and 



THE BEST APOLOGETIC 43 

every cause eventuates in a result. In the bal- 
anced system of things there is no room for ex- 
ternal interference; no room for the breaking 
through of a supernatural God to work his will 
in the world. God is in his world. The work- 
ing of natural law is the expression of his will. 
" We may not suppose that there is a twofold 
activity in God, a natural and a supernatural. 
Rather, natural law is itself the will of God; 
in which case it is impossible to see how God 
beside this will of his could have another will, 
how anything could happen which did not hap- 
pen according to law. But belief in the mirac- 
ulous logically implies that the natural and his- 
torical order is not so constituted that all the 
divine ends admit of being attained thereby. 
God finds resistance to be overcome in his own 
moral order. As Hoffding says, it is as if 
there were two Gods, the one operative in the 
customary course of things, the other correct- 
ing in single instances the work of the first. 
At all events, in such belief we waver hither 
and thither between God and nature; we seek 
the help of God only as a stop-gap on oc- 
casions when we think that nature cannot serve 
our purpose, and the result is that we neither 
feel ourselves at home in nature, nor are we 
fully at peace with the all-ruling providence of 
God." 

Miracles are the product of a non-scientific 



44 THE TEST 

age, and are more valuable as a psychological 
study than as a historical one. In the early 
stages of religion they are attributed to devils 
as well as to saints, and aside from some moral 
quality which they may show, are absolutely 
worthless from an evidential standpoint. _ The 
distinction between the devils and the Christ is 
not drawn by the performance of miracles, but 
rather by the kind of miracles performed — a 
distinction that required no miraculous ac- 
companiments in order to compel belief. The 
main question is not whether miracles have been 
performed, perhaps, but whether they have any 
standing in court at all, whether they are worth 
anvthing as evidence. " Miraculous narratives, 
like the Biblical, originating from no observer 
who possessed sufficient knowledge of the rela- 
tions and laws of nature to have a right to pro- 
nounce upon such matters, have no scientific im- 
portance. And the orthodox exaction of 
« faith ' in stories out of relation with every- 
thing we know, must be forever no less antag- 
onistic to the high activities of true faith than 
it is stultifving to science and common sense. 
\n intelligent man who now affirms his faith in 
such stories as actual facts can hardly know 
what intellectual honesty means." 

Are we discrediting the Bible by thus deny- 
in* the historic actualities of the miraculous 
tales in it? Not at all. The Bible does not 



THE BEST APOLOGETIC 45 



stand or fall with the inerrancy of all the things 
recorded in it. The Bible is not science, or the 
philosophy of history, or dogmatics or any- 
thing else but literature. It does not discredit 
the book for the purpose it is designed to meet, 
when we eliminate the incredible — for example, 
the long day in Joshua's experience, when the 
sun is said to have stood still for twenty-four 
hours. It would seem that God was more in- 
terested in the killing of the Amorites and their 
allies than he was in preserving the integrity 
of his own universe ! It is absurd, on the very 
face of it — as absurd as the silly story that 
God sent the bears out of the woods to tear forty 
and two little children who laughed at Elisha 
because he had gotten his hair cut! I say, it 
does not discredit the Bible for the purpose for 
which it was given. It is already discredited 
for purposes of science. The Bible does not 
obtain its moral value from the truth of its 
alleged miracles any more than it gains moral 
worthlessness from the lechery and moral loose- 
ness of many of its recorded saints. 

We hold the Bible in reverence not because it 
has folk-tales and legends mingled with its facts. 
Miracles do not give it an iota of spiritual 
potency. It is because we see in the book the 
great affirmations of moral truths that grip our 
soul and will not let it go ; it is because through 
it we catch sight of God, walking in the midst 



THE TEST 



of human life; it is because there comes from 
it the pulsing of a great Divine Heart, beating 
against our own ; because in its story of human 
experience, with its temptations, its falls, its 
longing after God, its moral triumphs, its spir- 
itual unfoldings, we see our own life written 
down, that the Bible appeals to us with a pro- 
found power. It is the something in the book 
that lies deeper than the letter of it, or the 
mere story — it is a voice out of the eternities 
that we hear in it. Not its miracles or its 
myths, but its moral fiber, lends an undying 
force to the book. It is not what we find in 
the Bible, as Coleridge said, that makes it vital 
and living, but it is that in the Bible which finds 
us. 

Science has shattered our old unquestioning 
credulity, and has stripped us of our super- 
stitious assent to the incredible in the Bible be- 
cause of a fictitious reverence we all have for 
things that are ancient and for things that are 
" written in a book." But we have come out 
from under the cloud of superstition stronger 
and better men and women, because we believe 
God for what he actually is, and not because 
of the idle tales and miracles that have been 
attributed to him. For, as Foster remarks, 
"What we need in order to see the glory of 
God is not miracle, but an open eye for the 
world in which we live. And our deepest needs 



THE BEST APOLOGETIC 47 

and longings, our desire for reconciliation and 
peace, our thirst after righteousness, life and 
blessedness — these find their satisfaction more 
surely when we hear in them the voice of him 
who has imbedded them in our nature, to reveal 
his love to us, than when we seek some guaran- 
tee outside of us that we dare rely on him, and 
need fear no illusion. So, too, a human Christ 
who does no more and no less than interpret 
to us the eternal revelation of God in human 
nature, and opens our eyes to see it, is no less 
adapted to reconcile us and lead us into son- 
ship than the superhuman entity of the church, 
which, with his epiphany and his performances, 
has no place in the pale of the natural life of 
humanity. And the same remark may be made 
of a human Christianity. Christianity is not 
miraculous stories — no matter how many or 
how miraculous they may be — but the spirit of 
Christ." 

Every recorded miracle may be proven to be 
a legend, devised by those whose anxiety to 
supplement the natural revelation of God by 
some puny, outside device led them to minimize 
the facts of our ordinary experience in the in- 
terest of a supernatural fiction, and yet there 
remains the most potent argument for Chris- 
tianity that has ever been put forward, or ever 
can be — the impact of the spirit and life of 
Jesus on the world. Christianity needs no sup- 



48 



THE TEST 



port from miracles or prophecies in the face of 
its own history. It needs no supernatural de- 
fense in the light of its own vital spirit. Why 
should we fly to the flimsy and unreal artifices 
of the incredible, in our apologetic for the worth 
of Jesus? Is there not proof enough, proof 
that can never be overthrown, in the irrefutable 
facts of Christian civilization? Admit there 
have been periods of stagnation, admit that 
for long seasons the world has been smothered 
under the baneful influence of ecclesiasticism, 
when the place of Jesus has been usurped by 
forms and ceremonies and dogmatism, yet when- 
ever the church would purify herself, and put 
on a new and indomitable strength, she has al- 
ways come back to the spirit of her Master and 
has drunk deep at the fountains of his simple 
gospel. Every fresh impulse toward a vital 
religious life has taken its rise from the pure 
springs of his quiet teaching and example. 
There is but one sure argument for Christian- 
ity, and that is not found in miracles or in 
prophecies, but in the historical effect of it and 
in its personal experience. One simple soul, 
spiritually awake, coming forth from the grave 
of his dead self, standing up in the world, fac- 
ing its problems with a resolute heart, living his 
life bravely and sanely and divinely through the 
inspiration of the spirit that was in Jesus, is 
worth more than all the miracles and old wives' 



THE BEST APOLOGETIC 49 



fables of all the Bibles. When I have gone down 
into the belly of hell, and have seen the pitiful 
wrecks of men lifted into the sunlight of God's 
grace and made over again into the semblance 
of his image ; when I have seen the bloated, blear- 
eyed waifs of the world coming forth from the 
graves of their loathsome past and, released 
from the cerements of their dead manhood, tak- 
ing their place again as men in the midst of life ; 
when I have seen the New Jerusalem coming 
down out of heaven and resting here and there 
upon communities, making the desert places of 
earth glad and beautiful with the beauty of holi- 
ness, I do not need you to tell me your putter- 
ing tales of swimming ax-heads and water 
turned into wine, and blind eyes opened and of 
resurrections ; for, behold the miracle of every 
day, the miracle of divine love working in the 
hearts of men now and here is better than all 
your age-old legends and wonder-tales. 

Nineteen hundred years ago there stood one in 
the midst of us like unto ourselves, and spake 
words of wisdom to the world. It was a world 
worn out and spent, overlaid with superstition 
and burdened with the dreary machinery of for- 
mal ecclesiasticism. From a feverish and fruit- 
less seeking after the bread of life among the 
dried and shriveled products of Phariseeism 
and of vain philosophies, men turned in despair 
and disgust. With an amazing contrast to the 



50 THE TEST 

complex formulas of the religious life of his 
time, Jesus preached the simple gospel of love: 
" By this shall all men know that ye are my 
disciples, if ye have love one to another." 
That God is the Father of us all, and that men 
are all endowed with divine possibilities, this 
was the simple, but potent, message that he 
gave to the world. The effect was magical, 
after the seed had had time to germinate. 
Christianity spread like a contagion through 
the world. Then it allied itself with princes 
and sought to conquer the world by the sword 
instead of by the spirit, and it became a dead, 
cold thing of forms and ceremonies. But over 
and over again, has the church come back to 
the simple gospel of Jesus, and found therein 
the springs of a new vitality and the impulse 
to a fresh energy. 

It is a singular fact that Jesus left no writ- 
ing. Not a single trace of doctrine has ever- 
been penned by him and handed down to the 
world. The so-called Gospels were written 
long after his death, and were compiled from 
memory, with additions and interpolations made 
in the interests of the theology and of the phi- 
losophy that had begun to grow up around his 
person and his teaching. Probably no gospel 
was written at all before the letters of Paul 
had circulated throughout the churches and 
had influenced more than a little the thought 



THE BEST APOLOGETIC 51 



of the early Christians. There is not a single 
saying of Jesus that we can know, for an abso- 
lute certainty, to be a genuine, literal saying 
of the Master. And yet, in spite of all these 
accretions and additions, in spite of the poor, 
pitiful attempts to bolster up his story with 
the imported philosophy of his time and with 
the grotesque tales of miracle and of wonder, 
there shines forth the splendor of his spirit, 
pure, serene and unclouded — a spirit that 
shall ever go before the stumbling feet of men 
leading them up the shining heights of their 
celestial possibility. 

It is this living spirit of Jesus that the world 
needs — not his words; they were spoken for 
his times and for his people. It is his vital 
grip on the great facts that underlie all our life 
that we need — the fact of God's fatherly good- 
ness and man's claim to it, the fact of human 
possibility and the divine emergence of man into 
it. Whatever beliefs about Jesus men may 
hold, whatever men may believe or try to be- 
lieve about his virgin birth, and his miracles 
and his resurrection — these things are all be- 
side the question and of no particular moment. 
It is his spirit that counts. " If any man have 
not the spirit of Christ he is none of his." 
Whatever else a man may possess in the way of 
credal assets is of little worth if he be not 
imbued with the life that was in the man Jesus. 



52 THE TEST 

It is the man's attitude toward the sort of life 
that Jesus lived in the world that determines 
finally his character. His attitude toward a 
creed or confession of faith is merely incidental, 
perhaps accidental. Neither his ecclesiastical 
connection, nor his confessional affiliation, is any 
substitute for the positive spirit of Jesus. 

When the life of Jesus went out on Calvary 
a strange thing took place. I do not refer to 
the stories of his bodily resurrection which are 
found in the traditions that surround Jesus' 
life — stories natural enough, perhaps, in the 
wistful, excited condition of his disciples' minds 
— but I refer to the breaking forth of his spirit 
in the life of his followers, at Antioch, and 
Capernaum and Jerusalem, and in Caesarea 
Philippi. Men who had been weak and timid, 
who dared not own their allegiance to him while 
he was with them, now stood up and fearlessly 
met their death for his sake, and the gospel's. 
If anyone had asked them what it was that in- 
spired them to these acts of courage and of 
steadfastness, they would have answered in the 
words of Paul: " I live, yet not I, for Christ 
liveth in me." And all down the years that 
have intervened since his forlorn and pitiful 
death on the Cross, men have caught his spirit 
and have walked in his ways, and the world 
has been the better for their living. 

The world will never outgrow Jesus. It will 



THE BEST APOLOGETIC 53 



outgrow our doctrines and our dogmas about 
Jesus. It will cast aside our theories over his 
words and over his works, but it cannot go be- 
yond the spirit of his teaching. There is noth- 
ing higher for men than he has offered them — 
sonship to God; there is nothing simpler than 
the method that he has given men to realize 
that sonship : " This is my commandment, 
that ye love one another as I have loved you. 55 
For when a man loves, he keeps all the law ; he 
can neither lie, nor steal, nor kill, nor bear false 
witness, nor covet, nor do anything else that is 
amiss. 

With the question of celestial metaphysics I 
have nothing to do. I am inclined to think 
that as Unitarians we are too much given to 
attempt to prove that Jesus was not God, 
rather than to prove that no sort of life is 
worth while that falls outside the lines that he 
laid down for us. With the number of per- 
sons in the Godhead we have nothing to do. 
The speculation is worse than idle. The whole 
question lies on a plane that is utterly impos- 
sible in this later age of scientific research. 
The sailor guides his ship by a fixed star, and 
he knows that if he only holds his rudder true, 
he will make the desired haven. It makes little 
difference to him whether the telescope resolves 
that star into a double star or into a group of 
stars. It guides him home, and that is enough. 



54 



THE TEST 



How far beyond the little knowledge of men the 
life of Jesus rises matters little. Whether he 
be man or whether he be a god, we care not. 
We know that if we follow him, we shall get 
home. 

" If Jesus Christ is a man, 

And only a man, I say 

That of all mankind I will cleave to him 

And to him will cleave alway. 

" If Jesus Christ is a God, 

And the only God, I swear 

I will follow him through heaven and hell, 

And earth and sea and air." 



INSPIRATION 



It has been unfortunate that the words " in- 
spiration " and " revelation " have been given 
a theological content. To narrow the idea of 
inspiration to some abnormal state of the mind 
in a past age, in which men were acted upon 
from without by some strange spirit operating 
outside the realm of natural law, for the ex- 
press purpose of revealing some dogmatic 
proposition, or for the purpose of laying down 
certain specific rules of practice: in short, to 
confine inspiration to any period of time, or to 
any set of men, or to any book or books, is 
to defraud the idea of its due and to divest it of 
its larger power in and on human life. It is 
a big word, this word " inspiration," and must 
be given a definition commensurate with its big- 
ness. There is a mighty truth at the heart 
of it, which the world cannot afford to lose 
sight of. 

The history of wellnigh all peoples emerges 
from a haze of vague tradition filled with 
gleaming bits of a far-off " Golden Age," when 
all the world was fair and God walked the high- 
ways of men, speaking face to face with proph- 

55 



56 



THE TEST 



ets and patriarchs, seers and saints. Religion 
often looks back to an ancient day of spiritual 
communion and supernatural fellowship, long 
since faded and forever sealed. These were the 
days when the oracles of God were revealed, 
when inspired men wrote the sacred scriptures 
that should be for all time. But science is a 
sad iconoclast. Plodding back through the 
centuries, Research finds that the "Golden 
Age," like the rainbow's foot, recedes as we ap- 
proach it and finally vanishes into thin air. 
The royal highway of tradition, that seemed to 
sweep past the majestic palace of some great- 
souled patriarch, where, in regal splendor and 
crowned with a halo of sanctity, some Father 
of the Faithful shed the mild effulgence of a 
life of holiness upon the people, dwindles, as 
we follow it, into a tortuous cattle-path, that 
twists across the hills to the dusty tents of a 
Bedouin sheik, whose morals are as doubtful as 
the myths that have gathered about his person. 
We dream of the prophets, and in our visions 
they take strange shape before us, the form of 
unearthly spirits, cloistered from the worlds 
tumult and confusion, there in the weird soli- 
tude-stillness listening to the Voice of the Lord 
as he spake his word in their ear, gazing in ec- 
static trance upon the scroll of the future 
sealed to duller eyes, or penning the message 
of the Almighty to men of distant ages, as some 



INSPIRATION 



57 



angelic Visitant, the herald of the Infinite, 
leaned across their trembling bodies and bade 
them write. But when the inexorable fingers 
of Fact lift the veil of Fancy, the glory fades 
from the mount of transfiguration, and instead 
of splendid creatures, too unearthly to be men 
and yet too human to be gods, we see a humble 
shepherd, finding his message among his flocks 
and herds, a plowman digging truth from the 
heart of God's earth, or a wide-eyed man read- 
ing the word of the Lord in the faces of his 
brethren on the street. 

Inspiration is not the coming of a new Spirit 
into the affairs of men. It is not the breaking 
of the orderly and natural way of doing things, 
by an external, supernatural, transcendent 
God, to reveal himself and his truth to men by 
erratic and abnormal means. It is just the 
perception of the eternal Spirit of Truth, which 
has been in the world from the beginning. 
There is a true light, which lighteth every man 
coming into the world. Not all men see it. 
But to them to whom the vision appears, it 
comes through no strange process, but by the 
unfolding of the moral and rational perception. 
Inspiration is a thing of spiritual and intel- 
lectual insight. It is having eyes to see and 
ears to hear what is going on in God's world. 
The inspired man is the man with mind and 
soul great enough and crystal-clear enough to 



58 THE TEST 

see beyond the little catch-penny world that we 
create out of our selfishness and materialism 
into the awful truth of things. It is of small 
moment what kind of truth it is that he sees. 
It is all God's truth ; and the man who finds a 
bit of it somewhere, and opens his life to it; 
who takes his little fragment of divine news and 
tries to teU it honestly to his brethren, is one 
of the inspired prophets of the Almighty. It 
may be an Isaiah, reading God's message in 
the faces of men or spelling out a divine word 
from the confused voices of his age ; it may be 
a Scottish plowboy, with the poet's soul, up- 
rooting a mountain daisy as he lays off the 
furrow, finding a gospel tangled in the torn 
roots of the flower and singing an immortal song 
about it; it may be the lad who hears God's 
whisper in the steam as he listens to the kettle 
crooning its old-fashioned melody as it swings 
on the sooty crane, or the grimy mechanic who 
sees in the midst of clanging hammers and whir- 
ring spindles and hissing valves a vision of 
some device that shall cheapen necessities and 
make life more tolerable for earth's millions; 
it may be the patient thinker, in the hush of his 
study, forging upon the anvil of logic a great 
thought that shall make men better and the 
world a holier place — all, all are inspired men 
and the instruments of God's Spirit of Wisdom. 
For inspiration is independent of the kind 



INSPIRATION 



59 



of truth perceived or revealed. There is no 
warrant for filching the halo from any truth. 
All truth is divine, though not all truth is ec- 
clesiastical or biblical. To run lines of cleav- 
age, splitting God's truth in twain, calling this 
secular and that divine, is both a violation of 
fundamental fact and intellectual treason 
against the moral order of the universe. There 
is no room for the secular in a world so full of 
God. 

Further, inspiration is not the sacred mo- 
nopoly of any literature or of any corporation. 
It is the heritage of the race. Galileo, Coper- 
nicus, Kepler, and the long list of those who 
have been peering into the mysteries of Nature, 
are as truly inspired men as Moses, or David, 
or Isaiah. The true poets are also true proph- 
ets, and the artists and musicians who are seek- 
ing to utter their visions of beauty or to ex- 
press in rhythmic harmonies the melodies that 
are singing in their souls, are ministers of the 
One Universal Spirit, whom men call God. 
More than this, the humble soul that is living 
its bit of a life under the spell of some dream 
of a higher truth of things, living its little days 
grandly, bringing into the pettiness of its op- 
portunity and the monotony of its treadmill 
routine some fragment of a divine largeness and 
dignity, is a soul more truly inspired than any 
weird, unearthly being that mumbles its broken 



60 THE TEST 

ecstasies in some solitary cloister, or, half-mad 
with prayer and fasting, seeks a message from 
the Almighty in the desert waste or upon the 
silent peaks of the mountains. The God- 
seeker, if he would surely find him, must not 
shut himself away from the pulsing heart of our 
common life. Believe me, God is more cer- 
tainly to be found in the busy haunts of men, 
in the places where the work of the world goes 
on, in the midst of the dust and tears and strife, 
the failures and successes, the hopes and fears 
and disappointments and joys that make up 
the life of earth's children, in the homes and 
schools and shops and streets of our cities,— 
here, I say, God is more certainly to be found 
than in all the Bibles, and in all the shrines and 
temples. Here, where the multiform life of the 
world is lived, is the place to go God-seek- 
ing- 

For long the thought has dominated the 
world that inspired truth has found its way in 
the earth only through the lips of a certain 
few men in the distant past, and is now forever 
sealed within the covers of a sacred book ; that 
here and there a soul became the vehicle through 
which the Almighty uttered his Word to men, 
and, when the lips of the speaker had crumbled 
to dust and the age of the Prophets had ended, 
God was too poor in resources or too niggard 
of his truth to speak again to the groping 



INSPIRATION 



61 



children of men. So there came to be a theory 
of a closed deposit of divine revelation, a sys- 
tem of faith " once for all delivered to the 
saints," a bundle of little pamphlets containing 
the sole treasury of divine truth, hidden away 
in the midst of a single people, while the myr- 
iad hosts that swarm the earth reel on to the 
awful brink of life without the knowledge nec- 
essary to their soul's salvation. We have been 
asked to believe in a God who is less than just, 
a God whose character and acts would not bear 
the moral tests of even our imperfect lives. It 
is all wrong, pitifully wrong. Surely God 
must be better than the best we know, and the 
soul of a good man has no room in it for hate, 
for jealousy, for revenge, for partiality, for 
brutal vindictiveness or cruel indifference. 

The world is full of religions. All down the 
ages men have gone looking for God. And 
they have found him, each in his own way. 
The roads are many, but they all lead to the 
One God. By what right, then, do we seize 
our theological bludgeons and invading the 
sanctities — rude sanctities, perhaps — of 
those worshipers who try to body their con- 
ceptions of the Power behind it all in images 
and idols, ruthlessly shatter into bits that which 
is sacred in their eyes? Were it not wiser, 
yea, were it not nearer the truth, to look upon 
these crude, distorted figures as symbols of a 



62 THE TEST 

people's longing after the Infinite Soul of 
Things, as signs of a people's best endeavors 
to think upward, and that it is all a step, a 
divine step, in the evolution of a perfected man- 
hood? If we were wiser still, I think we would 
put off our shoes from our feet even in the 
presence of a heathen's god of stone, for we are 
standing in a people's " Holy of Holies," and 
in laying our hand upon yon graven image we 
are touching a fragment of the living God, and 
our eyes, as we gaze upon it, are looking upon 
a bit of divine inspiration. 

In thinking upon these various religions, we 
must continually correct our findings by one 
important consideration, viz., that religions 
have no value in themselves. Their worth is 
commensurate with their moral efficiency. 
That religion is best which makes the best men. 
The value of a religion lies neither in its forms, 
its sacred literature or its organization, but in 
its moral dynamic. If we admit that the reli- 
gion of Jesus is the finest type of religion thus 
far produced in the evolution of the race, yet 
we must not think that it is the only religion 
worthy of a man's thought, or even the only 
divinely inspired religion. The processes of de- 
velopment, whether of worlds or men, do not 
move forward abreast of each other, like well- 
drilled troops. The heavens show us to-day all 
stages of world-life, from the birth of planets 



INSPIRATION 



63 



out of nebulous haze and star-dust through 
molten orbs and whirling sphere to those dead 
globes whose icy corpses are still flung along 
the paths in which they once had burned and 
glowed. Likewise do we find in the earth to- 
day the various steps by which the mind and 
soul of man has climbed from savagery to civ- 
ilization. The religions of men keep pace with 
their growing spiritual capacities. With an 
infinite patience, the Power that is working si- 
lently at the heart of things leads the stumbling 
feet of the peoples of earth toward the stature 
of perfect manhood. Some move faster than 
others, but all move toward the same " far-off, 
divine event," and all are quickened by the same 
Spirit. We are all of us God's wandering chil- 
dren, trying to find our way to the Father's 
House. Some of us think we catch clearer 
glimpses of the way, but let us take heed how 
we despise our brethren of slower insight, who 
stagger along in the dark of superstition, or 
who, hungry for a vision of the God they can- 
not see, but dream of, make for themselves 
crude symbols of him out of dumb stone, — 
the mute alphabet by which the wistful heart 
spells out a gospel for its comfort and its hope. 
By devious ways the soul of man has followed 
the footprints of the Almighty to and fro in 
the earth. And if, by crooked, halting paths 
some of God's little ones have gone crying after 



64j THE TEST 

him, who are we, to lay our curse upon them 
because they follow not with us? 

" Bowing thyself in dust before a Book, 

And thinking the great God is thine alone, 

O rash iconoclast, thou wilt not brook 

What gods the heathen carves in wood and stone; 

As if the Shepherd who from outer cold 

Leads all his shivering lambs to one sure fold 

Were careful of the fashion of his crook." 

All religions have in them the seeds of divine 
truth, and for their time and for their people 
they are divine forces, divine inspirations. I 
do not maintain that one is as good as another. 
Each is to be rated according to its lifting ca- 
pacity. All have their place in the moral evo- 
lution of the race. The great end of religion 
is the same, no matter what form it may as- 
sume. In the development of a fine, true man- 
hood, God is using all religions and all bibles. 
Neither divineness nor inspiration can be denied 
any one of them that is tugging to lift the peo- 
ple who hold it a little higher in their concep- 
tion of things. All of them are reaching out 
after the same God. It makes little difference 
by what name they call him. Great facts are 
indifferent to the labels we put on them. God 
is not baptized into any form of faith. No 
time or people can persuade the Almighty to 
take up his exclusive abode in its literature or 



INSPIRATION 



65 



in its ecclesiastical corporation. The true in- 
spiration does not lie in a book written for all 
time, or in a society organized for all time, but 
in the living souls of the living men of any time. 
God's inspired book is never finished. It is not 
penned on parchment in a tongue that is dead, 
or graven on stone. It is a Book of Life, and 
the words are spelled out of the flesh and blood 
of men. 

" Slowly the Bible of the race is writ, 
And not on paper leaves or leaves of stone; 
Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it, 
Texts of despair or hope, or joy or moan." 

The true inspiration is the anointing with in- 
sight that touches the eyes of them that love 
the Truth, and watch eagerly for her coming. 
It is a vision of the verities of which all Nature 
is but the symbol and all life but an opportunity 
for utterance. The inspired man is only the 
man whose soul has been tuned to the Infinite. 
He is the seer, the man who sees, and whether 
the truth he sees is a gleam of light through 
science, or economics, or politics, or business, 
or any one of the many sides of life, it is a bit 
of the One Eternal Truth shining out of dif- 
ferent windows. Truth is all one, but the eye 
that apprehends it varies. 

But I must not linger here. I wish to say 
a word about the way in which men are inspired. 



66 



THE TEST 



Sometimes inspiration seems to be the work of 
a mighty Spirit pressing down upon the souls 
and minds of a whole generation of men. We 
speak of the " Spirit of the Age." It is no idle 
phrase. Over and over again has the world 
felt upon it the touch of a power not itself 
making for some great end. Over and over 
again there has swept through the heart of the 
race a strange impulse that has lifted it like 
a tide and borne it toward some divine achieve- 
ment. No man has known whence it came. 
Like the wind which bloweth where it Ksteth, 
and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst 
not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth, 
so is everyone that is born of this Spirit. We 
only know that it is here. We are under the 
spell of it. It commands, and we run to do its 
bidding. 

Sometimes the inspiration comes through a 
great ideal. Men have dreamed dreams and 
have seen visions in the deeps of their soul's 
solitude, and have gone forth glorified to fash- 
ion the day's work after the pattern that was 
showed them in the mount. Over every mighty 
task there hovers an ideal, none the less real be- 
cause the dull eyes of the multitude do not see it. 
Over every picture that Raphael painted, over 
every marble that Angelo chiseled, over every 
composition of Beethoven, there floated the 
ideal, the beautiful, beckoning ideal, calling 



INSPIRATION 



67 



them to bring all the powers of soul and mind 
and technical skill into her service. Raphael's 
" Madonna," Angelo's " Moses," and Beetho- 
ven's " Ninth Symphony " are just the attempt 
to catch this ideal in color, to utter it in mar- 
ble or to voice it in music. The ideal was not 
the creation of these men, it was their vision. 

So, too, with ideas. A great thought flames 
in the mind of the little Monk of Wittenberg, 
and the world catches fire. A passion sweeps 
through the soul of an obscure citizen, and a 
great idea shapes itself there in the turmoil of 
his spirit. The man perished miserably, but the 
idea marched through the land, breaking the 
shackles from a race of slaves. Thought is 
contagious. There is no power among men 
mightier than that developed by an epidemic of 
ideas. 

Probably the commonest way in which men 
are inspired is by the touch of a great person- 
ality upon their lives. There are souls whose 
native air seems to be on the heights, souls to 
whom life is a thing intensely human, yet filled 
with a fine, sweet seriousness and a divine no- 
bility. These souls are wonderfully alive, yet, 
perhaps, as wonderfully quiet. They are in- 
stinct with a marvelous potentiality. Their 
smile is a benediction and their very presence is 
an uplift. They pass through the world as 
springtime passes through the earth, leav- 



THE TEST 



ing in their path a thousand virtues which have 
wakened into life in souls their own earnest, 
vital strength has touched. Here and there 
such spirits come to us, all aglow with the flame 
of a holier, truer manhood or womanhood, and 
there rises up to meet them all that is best in 
us, and, presently, we too are burning with the 
same holy fire. I think it was something like 
this which constituted the winsomeness of Jesus 
of Nazareth — not some strange thing which 
separates him from the least of us, but that 
sweet humanness, strong, sane, wholesome, 
which, while it rises so high and white and clean 
over against our own life, yet draws us to itself 
because we see in it our own selves writ large. 

Down in the black ooze of a sluggish pond is 
buried a rough, misshapen root-stock. It has 
lain there long and has added only a few strag- 
gling fibers to its growth. Day by day the 
great sun hangs over it and woos it. On a glad 
morning in summer, a shaft of light trembles 
down through the still water. It kisses the 
root-stock with a kiss of life-giving power, and, 
lo, where the lips of the sunbeam were pressed 
there springs up a bit of green. Little by little 
it reaches up through the blue, till, by and by, 
there comes a day when, between its round, flat, 
floating leaves there bursts forth a flower of 
wondrous purity, whose golden heart is always 
turned toward the sun that gave it life. Then 



INSPIRATION 



69 



the root-stock that had lain so long half -buried 
in the mire looks up at the glory that has 
sprung forth from itself, and catches the thrill 
of a new hope. The snowy blossom that floats 
above its unsightliness reveals a possibility it 
had never dreamed of. All these days had the 
sun kissed it, and it had not known what power 
was being poured upon it. Now the doors of 
life fly open. It sees a prophecy of things al- 
most incredible. There stirs within it the 
might of a new spirit. It reaches up to the 
sunbeams. It drinks in the wine of life that 
comes flooding down from above. It grows and 
rises in the hope and prophecy that all its life 
shall one day be uttered in terms of this ideal 
that blooms above it and pervades the very air 
with its matchless perfume. So does the life 
of Jesus, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, 
touch our souls with its strong inspiration. 
We see in him our own manhood lifting itself 
above all sordid meanness and wrong. We see 
the possibility that opens before the least man 
of us. We stand upon our feet. We stretch 
ourselves toward the fullness of a man's stature. 
The awful thrill of a new ideal and a new in- 
spiration quivers in our spirit. We see how 
much life means, and feel that to be a man is 
little less than being a god, and in the strength 
of this living ideal we push out from the old 
root-stock and begin to live as divine men ought 



70 



THE TEST 



to live. Such is the influence of the Carpenter- 
Christ. Such is the influence, the inspirational 
power, in varying degree, of every true, manly 
life in the world. In fact, the only terms in 
which we can measure the worth to the world of 
any man's living are the terms of its inspira- 
tional force. The real bigness of the soul can- 
not be measured by its mere absorptive capac- 
ity. It is not so much the amount we learn as 
the amount we teach that gives our life potency. 
Spiritual culture is not an equivalent for spir- 
itual quickening-power. It is fine to be in- 
spired, it is finer to be an inspiration. Life, 
whether individual or social, gets its construc- 
tive worth from its moral dynamic. This is as 
true of a church as of a man. 

In the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, at Jeru- 
salem, there takes place at Easter time, a 
strange and impressive service. It is midnight, 
and dense crowds of worshipers are packed in 
the little church and in the streets leading to it. 
Within all is dark, silent, solemn. The hours 
pass, and the crowds wait. For what? The 
High Priest has entered the rocky tomb where 
Jesus is said to have been laid, and, it is said, 
that at midnight a mysterious fire appears in 
the heart of the sepulchre, from which the priest 
lights a torch which he has taken with him into 
the tomb. The hour strikes. In the oppress- 
ive stillness, the thick darkness is suddenly 



INSPIRATION 



71 



pierced by a flickering ray from the mouth of 
the grave. A blazing torch is handed out, and 
passed eagerly to the hands of the breathless 
watchers. Now we see what the darkness had 
hidden from us. Every man has his torch with 
him, and he lights it there at the sacred fire. 
Then out through the streets of the city they 
go, each man kindling his neighbor's torch, as 
he meets him in the way, till presently all Jeru- 
salem gleams with fire, the fire that was found 
in the holy place. It is a plain parable. Need 
I apply it? 



THE DREAMERS 



I have been reading again recently certain 
passages from a little book of Ruskin's, a book 
rarely found in the ordinary collections of his 
works,— "The Harbours of England," pub- 
lished in 1856. In the initial chapter he tells 
us how his wonder is excited by the bow of a 
boat, the " blunt head of a common, undecked 
sea-boat, lying aside in its furrow of beach sand. 
. . . That rude simplicity of bent plank, that 
can breast its way through the death that is in 
the deep sea, has in it the soul of shipping. 
Beyond this, we may have more work, more men, 
more money ; we cannot have more miracle. . . . 

" The man who made it knew not that he was 
making anything beautiful, as he bent its planks 
into those mysterious, ever-changing curves. 
... He leaves it when all is done, without a 
boast. It is simple work, but it will keep out 
water. And every plank is a Fate, and has 
men's lives wreathed in the knots of it, as the 
cloth-yard shaft had their deaths in its plumes." 

As we read on in the chapter we fall upon this 
passage: "I doubt if ever academic grove 
were half so fit for profitable meditation as the 

n 



THE DREAMERS 73 



little strip of shingle between two, black, steep, 
overhanging sides of stranded fishing-boats. 
The clear, heavy water-edge of ocean rising and 
falling close to their bows, in that unaccount- 
able way which the sea always has in calm 
weather, turning the pebbles over and over as 
if with a rake, to look for something, and then 
stopping a moment down at the bottom of the 
bank, and coming up again with a little run 
and clash, throwing a foot's depth of salt crys- 
tal in an instant between you and the round 
stone you are going to take in your hand ; sigh- 
ing all the while as if it would infinitely rather 
be doing something else. And the dark flanks 
of the fishing-boats all aslope above, in their 
shining quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty 
and seamed with square patches of plank nailed 
over their rents ; just enough to let the little, 
flat-footed fisher-children haul or twist them- 
selves up to the gunwales, and drop back again 
along some stray rope; just round enough to 
remind us, in their broad and gradual curves, 
of the sweep of the green surges they know so 
well, and of the hours when those old sides of 
seared timber, all ashine with the sea, plunge 
and dip into the green purity of the mounded 
waves more joyfully than a deer lies down 
among the grasses of spring, the soft white 
clouds of foam opening momentarily at the 
bows, and fading or flying high into the breeze 



74 THE TEST 

where the sea-gulls toss and shriek the joy and 
beauty of it, all the while, so mingled with the 
sense of unfathomable danger, and the human 
effort and sorrow going on perpetually from 
age to age, waves rolling forever and winds 
moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting 
and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed 
away about the rattling beach like weeds for- 
ever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat, 
through the starless night and hopeless dawn, 
His hand, who spread the fisher's net over the 
dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the 
fisher's hand the keys of the kingdom of heaven." 

Or, go on a bit farther till we come to where 
he speaks of the homely ships that wear out 
their lives in the humble carrying trade of the 
day, in the dull, prosaic, but necessary traffic 
that ministers to human wants. " I respect in 
the merchant service," he says, « only those 
ships that carry coals, herrings, salt, timber, 
iron and such commodities, and that have dis- 
agreeable odor, and unwashed decks. But 
there are few things more impressive to me than 
one of these ships lying up against some lonely 
quay in a black sea-fog, with the furrow traced 
under its tawny keel far in the harbor slime. 
The noble misery there is in it, the might 
of its rent and strained unseemliness, its 
wave-worn melancholy, resting there for a lit- 
tle while in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, 



THE DREAMERS 75 



and claiming no pity; still less honored, 
least of all conscious of any claim to honor; 
casting and craning by due balance what- 
ever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet 
truth of time; spinning of wheel, and slacken- 
ing of rope, and swinging of spade, in as accu- 
rate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of 
its crew perhaps away forward, a hungry boy 
and yelping dog eagerly interested in some- 
thing from which a dull blue smoke rises out 
of pot or pan ; but dark-browed and silent, their 
limbs slack, like the ropes above them, entan- 
gled as they are in those inextricable meshes 
about the patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed 
sable sail. What a majestic sense of service 
in all that languor ! the rest of human limbs and 
hearts, at utter need, not in sweet meadows or 
soft air, but in harbor slime and biting fog; 
so drawing their breath once more to go out 
again, without lament, from between the two 
skeletons of pier-heads, vocal with the wash of 
the under-wave, into the gray troughs of tum- 
bling brine; there, as they can, with slacked 
rope, and patched sail, and leaky hull, again to 
roll and stagger far away amid the wind and 
salt sleet, from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, 
winning day by day their daily bread; and for 
last reward, when their old hands, some winter 
night, lose feeling along the frozen ropes, and 
their old eyes miss the mark of the lighthouse 



76 THE TEST 

quenched in foam, to so-long impossible Rest, 
that shall hunger no more, neither thirst any 
more — their eyes and mouths filled with the 
brown sea-sand." 

What is it in these words of Ruskin that grips 
the heart-strings and wrings from even the care- 
less soul a sense of sympathy for the restless 
toilers of the deep? It is not the subtle charm 
of his diction, though that runs smooth and lim- 
pid as a woodland burn, nor is it the pleasing 
rhythm of the language, that falls upon the ear 
like the tinkling of silver bells. Rather it is 
the magic of his poetic gift, which touches with 
enchanted wand the unseeing eyes of pur imag- 
ination, and wakes the slumbering god of fancy, 
till we, too, gaze upon the common world with 
something of the poet's outlook, and find, to 
our surprise, like the prophet of olden time, that 
even amid the ruck and confusion and rubbish 
of human life, there lingers a divine glory, only 
our eyes were holden that we saw it not. 

No one, having listened to Ruskin, can ever 
look upon the crudest product of the boat- 
builder's handicraft, without seeing in the blunt 
bow and rough sides something of the human 
tragedy and human joy they mutely stand for. 
All the gamut of human experience can be heard 
in the wind that whistles through the rude rig- 
ging; the heart-ache, the disappointment, the 
bitterness of life; its sacrifices and accomplish- 



THE DREAMERS 77 



ments ; its failures and successes. The roar of 
the sea-fight, the sob of widowhood as the waves 
part to receive the shotted shroud of the dead; 
the song of the sailor lad and the welcoming 
hail that marks the end of the long run; and 
love, and home, and happiness are all recorded 
there on the briny hull of each sea-faring craft. 
But, for most of us, the clumsy hulk has little 
meaning, till some poet, or dreamer, with the 
far-seeing vision, spells out for us the mean- 
ing of the commonplace. It is only a boat, 
and a bit of beach, and an uncouth sailor in the 
shrouds, till the dreamer wakes us, and through 
his clairvoyant eyes we see no longer a boat, 
and a bit of beach, and a sailor-lad, but sym- 
bols and signs of human destiny. 

We live in an age that prides itself on being 
unpoetic and that insists on what it terms 
" facts." And what are facts, but just bits of 
truth which it has broken off and gathered into 
heaps and bundles? We are fed with them till 
our soul is sick, and we feel as did Whitman : — 

" When I heard the learned astronomer, 

When the proofs, the figures were ranged in col- 
umns before me, 

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to 
add, divide, and measure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lec- 
tured with much applause in the lecture-room, 

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 



78 THE TEST 

Till rising, and gliding out, I wandered off by my- 
self, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to 
time 

Looked up in perfect silence at the stars. 

There is a sublime impatience of the soul with 
the dry husks of things which men measure out 
to us. Facts are stubborn things, it is said. 
Yes, and they are dull, isolated things, till some 
man with the vision has taken them and inter- 
preted them in terms of life. « Give us facts ! " 
cries the world, but the man who knows how-to 
pray aright amends this petition, and cries, 
" Nay, not facts, but the meaning of facts, the 
larger truth for which these fragmentary facts 
stand." The most ardent delver in the soil 
cannot by his searching find out the God of 
Things, nor can the scanner of the heavens spy 
out his throne. Only those to whom Nature 
is a vast metaphor, a divine hieroglyphic, catch 
glimpses of the nameless Soul of Things behind 

it all. . 

The world can never get on without its 
dreamers. This present time plumes itself on 
being " practical," and allots small room for the 
imagination in its philosophy of life. But a 
philosophy without imagination is like a house 
without windows, and all the virtues that dwell 
therein become mildewed and moldy. It is not 



THE DREAMERS 79 



the actual, but the ideal, that attracts us. It is 
only because we dream, and live in the midst of 
our dreams, that life is tolerable for any of us. 
It is the world that Hope creates and Imagina- 
tion gilds with a golden glory that lures us on 
when our feet falter from weariness and our 
heart faints under the burden of living. Rob, 
us of our poetry, and you have made life stale, 
flat and unprofitable. It is a sorry day for 
any man when he has lost the poetic instinct 
out of his life, or has allowed his imaginative 
faculty to shrivel and die; when he sees only 
tilings, so much stuff and material, to be multi- 
plied and transmuted, — not into some higher 
form, — but into more material and more stuff; 
when, out of the multitudinous experiences out 
of which life is made, out of the buying and 
selling and eating and drinking, there emerges 
no glimpse of a larger purpose, no vision of the 
meaning that gives to life its dignity and sig- 
nificance. 

In the heart of every age is hidden away a 
little handful of leaven. It is made up of those 
great souls, of those simple, crystal-clear souls, 
whose vision has stretched away beyond the nar- 
row limits of its time and rested on the gleaming 
turrets of a world to be, a world of better and 
braver men and women. Each generation has 
brought forth its seers, who, in the midst of the 
noises and confusions of life, 



80 THE TEST 

" Saw distant gates of Eden gleam,^ 
And did not dream it was a dream." 

They trumpeted their message in the heavy ears 
of their day, and passed unhonored into the 
eternal silence, but the living word that they 
spake. the vision they declared, the dream they 
published to the world, survives them and comes 
forth one day in the form of an institution. 

It is the dreamer who furnishes the world 
with its most potential forces. It is ideals, not 
facts, aspirations, not accomplishments, that 
are the dynamic motive of the world. It is the 
dreamer, who catches a sight of some clear prin- 
ciple that we need to know, and grips us lesser 
men and holds us steady to the truth of it, 
till we see it and make it our own, who furnishes 
the lifting power in human life. Every great 
inspiration is born of a great vision. Dreams 
alone cannot build a world. There must be 
practical, hard-headed, unimaginative workers, 
but the dream comes first. Fancy must pre- 
cede fact, art must antedate action. Architec- 
ture, painting, music, sculpture, governments, 
inventions, exist because men have dreamed. 
They saw the temple shining in the sun, and 
they builded its towers out of splendid thought 
before the sound of the hammer and mallet was 
heard, and the stone still lay undug in the 
quarry. Thev heard the sound of singing and 



THE DREAMERS 81 



the crash of chords in the deeps of their own 
soul, before the melody or the harmony had as- 
sumed a visible form. They saw a State lifting 
itself proudly in the land, clothed with sov- 
ereign power, and cities filled with prosperous 
people, while as yet the desert spread its un- 
broken solitude, and the voice of the pioneer had 
not yet disturbed the solemn stillness of the 
mountains. What names are counted among 
the dreamers! Abraham, and Moses, and Je- 
sus, and Paul; Galileo, and Copernicus, and 
Newton, and Kepler; Columbus, and the Pil- 
grims, and Washington, and Lincoln; and the 
long list of those who in all ages and in all 
climes looked out upon this troubled life of 
ours, and saw amid the riot and the restlessness, 

" the hands 

That reach through Nature, moulding men. ,, 

The deeds of men are for time, but the dreams 
of men are immortal. The gnawing tooth of 
Time consumes the proudest monuments which 
men have reared, and the dust of an irresistible 
oblivion covers them with its impartial mantle. 
But great thoughts are ageless and live on in 
the ideals of the race. 

" Whether on the mart, 
Or on the Heliconian hills apart, 
Toil at thy temples builded in the sky. 
Dreams are in sooth, the only verity." 



82 



THE TEST 



Hail, then, to the seer and dreamer of dreams, 
who have discounted the pangs of time, and, 
faithful to the heavenly vision, have dared to be 
true to their sublime conceptions, in the midst 
of an unseeing world. 



A TRANSPARENT WORLD 

I knew a boy, years and years ago, who lived 
in a cottage on the bank of the blue St. Law- 
rence, and saw wonderful visions as he gazed 
out across the restless waters, and heard strange 
voices calling to him from the rolling river. 
At night, before he was tucked into his little 
bed, he would stand for a moment by the open 
window, and, stretching out his chubby arms 
toward a great star that swung above him in 
the dusky heavens, would bid it " good night 99 
and then snuggle down to sleep, feeling that no 
harm could come to him, for was not the star, 
his star, he called it, keeping watch above his 
pillow? When the dawn stole into his tiny 
room, and the blue eyes opened again on the 
beautiful world, he would talk with the sun- 
beam that danced along the wall, and hold con- 
verse with the roses that looked in at the case- 
ment. For all things were alive to him, and a 
spirit whose language he could understand 
whispered its messages in every experience that 
made up the boy's bit of a world. But the 
mother was troubled. She could not under- 
stand, for the years had disillusioned her, as 

83 



84 



THE TEST 



they have since disillusioned him, and a glory 
has gone from earth and sky which comes not 
back again. To the child there is no distinc- 
tion between heaven and earth, and the sharp 
line which we draw between the world of spirit- 
ual realities and the world of harsh and barren 
fact does not exist for him. 

" Heaven lies about us in our infancy/' 

sang the poet, What we call the imagination 
of childhood is, perhaps, only a keener insight 
into the meaning of things, which the labored 
reasoning of later years has served but to cloud 
and obscure. To the open eye of the child, 
life is a transfigured thing. The world is lumi- 
nous and vital. He prattles to the stones and 
babbles his baby confidences to the trees and 
flowers, as if they were his chums and comrades, 
eager to share the griefs and joys of his own 
little heart and all bound together by a spirit 
of mothering love. There is no fear and no 
evil in the love-world of the child. I think I 
can understand somewhat the deep meaning that 
lies in the words of him who loved the wee folk, 
when he said: " Verily, verily, I say unto you, 
Except ye change back again, and become as 
little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom 
of heaven." He was not talking about a place. 
The kingdom of heaven, to him, was an ever- 
present reality, and, because it was a spiritual 



A TRANSPARENT WORLD 85 



reality, they alone could enter it and become 
partakers of its life, whose clear vision could 
see through the varied forms of things and de- 
tect the spirit that was trying to utter itself 
in material shape. I think that Jesus was en- 
deavoring to make plain to us that we are liv- 
ing in a transparent world, and that if we would 
only forget our philosophies, and our formal 
religions, and our science and our nescience, 
which lie like a veil upon our eyes, and become 
simple and honest in our approach to life, as 
do the children, we would see 

" Earth crammed with heaven 
And every common bush afire with God." 

But we walk through the world, most of us, 
leaden footed and heavy-eyed, missing the mean- 
ing of it all, the joy and uplift that are sweep- 
ing through it all, with eyes that see no glory 
and ears that are deaf to a thousand messages 
that come singing from the sea, and murmur- 
ing down from the mountain-tops, and whisper- 
ing in every wind. 

We are held fast by the material aspect of 
things, which, by its very nearness and obtru- 
siveness, forces itself upon our attention, shut- 
ting out the real world of spirit that lies back 
of it. All that we see, or hear, or touch, all 
that we apprehend by our senses, is only the 
visible utterance of a reality, unseen by our 



86 



THE TEST 



mental vision, but clear to the spirit that is in 
us, which is trying to utter itself in tangible 
form. Lowell has put the thought in words of 
matchless beauty in his " Vision of Sir Laun- 
fal": 

" And what so rare as a day in June? 

Then,, if ever, come perfect days; 
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, 

And over it softly her warm ear lays: 
Whether we look or whether we listen, 

We hear life murmur, or see it glisten; 
Every clod feels a stir of might, 

An instinct within it that reaches and towers, 
And, groping blindly above it for light, 

Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers/* 

The great brown earth lies there in the sun- 
shine, seemingly a vast heap of inert matter. 
Then forth from it push the lance-like blades 
of grass, and the little green banners of the 
flowers are hung swaying in the summer winds. 
Down in the soft mold something is at work 
in the darkness, seizing the lifeless clod and 
translating it into a revelation of beauty ; some- 
thing is reaching up a strange negative to the 
sunlight, and is printing its own likeness in 
color. And we see the leaf, and smell the odor 
of the blossom, and forget the unseen some- 
thing that 

" reaches and towers, 
And climbs to a soul in grass and the flowers." 



A TRANSPARENT WORLD 87 

All visible organisms are built by their in- 
visible residents, not for them. The hidden 
Life, animal, human, or divine, is ever carving 
its own animated statues. The visible universe 
is but a vast metaphor, through which spiritual 
truth may be read. The material creation is 
but the recorded attempt of the spirit-world 
to actualize itself to our senses. For there are 
two worlds, a seen and an unseen, and one is 
but the halting, stammering utterance of the 
other. But to those who have eyes to see, the 
material world is transparent, and through it 
they catch glimpses of the real world of which 
it is only an expression. 

" To him who in the love of Nature holds 
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks 
A various language," 

sang one of our own poets. But the speech 
is strange to most of us, and the message is 
swallowed up in the noise and riot of the ma- 
terial and sense world. It is only the poets, 
and the children, who hear the Voice speaking 
in the Garden in the cool of the day. As one 
has written : " The mute eloquence of Nature 
around us is often most pathetic; the beauty 
that is everywhere taking crude shapes, trying 
to find expression. Sometimes this pathos is 
made audible through sweet, half-developed 
voices. Waters murmur; winds whisper and 



88 



THE TEST 



moan ; grass and blossom and leafy bough sigh 
back to each other, like children who cannot tell 
what they want. The dumb rock tries to write 
out its message with hieroglyphic lichens. Sea- 
moss and ferns conceal mystical secrets beneath 
their spreading fronds. The lowest forms of 
matter are overflowing with significance. Even 
the slimy ooze of the lake and the black coal 
in the mine hold an essence of purity within 
them that nourishes the white life of the lily 
and kindles the sparkle of the diamond. Noth- 
ing is so dead that it does not seek utterance, 
— that it does not strive to blend itself with 
some unattainable perfection above itself." 
The silent unfolding of Nature in flower and 
tree, the noiseless shifting of the skies, the voice- 
less glories of dawn and sunset, the ceaseless 
flow of the unseen Life that is ever making dumb 
signs to us out of the earth, as if charged with 
some mighty secret that it would fain make 
known to us, some hidden pass-word of the 
Great that it is trying to spell out to our dull 
vision — all this is but the quiet revelation of 
a truth that lies too deep for human speech. 
Nature is silent only because we do not under- 
stand her language, and our ears are heavy 
and untuned to her myriad voices. In the in- 
tonations of the wind, the colors and odors of 
flowers, the changeful suffusion of sunset tints, 
or the musical droppings of twilight dews ; in 



A TRANSPARENT WORLD 89 



the stillness of the night when darkness mothers 
the earth and croons her lullabies to the sleep- 
ing world, in the shimmer of light with which 
the stars jewel the sea, in storm and in sunshine, 
in life and in death, she writes God's word be- 
fore our stupid eyes, but, alas, most of us see 
nothing but weeds and patches of color and a 
few shreds of tattered cloud, that carry in them 
no eternal meaning and no living message for 
our souls. 

To look upon the world of men and things 
as a revelation of the unseen, to find behind 
every appearance the quivering soul that ani- 
mates it, to press back of the stammering ut- 
terance to the spirit that speaks through all 
phenomena, — this is to find the secret of life, 
it is to enter the kingdom of heaven. To pierce 
through the mask of things and see the real 
that stands there waiting to be known, is to 
" Correct the portrait by the living face; 99 

is to catch glimpses of 

" The Vision whereunto 
In joy, with pantings, from afar 

Through sound and odor, form and hue, 

And mind and clay, and worm and star — 

Now touching goal, now backward hurled — 

Toils the indomitable world." 

" The heavens declare the glory of God, and 
the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto 



90 



THE TEST 



day uttereth speech and night unto night 
sheweth knowledge." The world is transfigured 
to him who sees it as the trailing vestments of 
an unseen life, and all matter becomes eloquent 
to him who finds it forever "haunted by the 
eternal Mind." Said William Blake: "When 
the sun rises I see — not a round disc of fire — 
but an innumerable company of the heavenly 
host, crying, ' Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God 
Almighty.' " Another writes, " It is only a ful- 
fillment of the deepest prophesyings of renovated 
sou l s — prophesyings that the poet and the art- 
ist utter in broken speech — when the Divine 
Revealers show us a spiritual world that tran- 
scends the natural: a world of forms and sub- 
stances so much nearer in degree to spirit that 
they pulsate with its life and breathe with its 
fragrancy, and put on robes chromatic with all 
its beauty, and quick with the rustlings of its 
love; a world of subjective scenery, on which 
ever lies the sweet morning-light of subjective 
peace; a world therefore whose leaf can never 
wither and whose flower never fade, because it 
wears the coloring of souls that are flooded 
with life everlasting." Was it not Mrs. Brown- 
ing who wrote, with the poet's insight: 

" That not a natural flower can grow on earth, 
Without a flower upon the spiritual side, 
Substantial, archetypal, all aglow 
With blossoming causes, — not so far away 



A TRANSPARENT WORLD 91 



That we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared, 
May not catch something of the bloom and breath, 
Too vaguely apprehended, though indeed 
Still apprehended, consciously or not. 

When we have understood where, in this 
tangled maze of things, the real world actually 
lies ; when we have paused for a little, amid the 
confusion and dust of daily drudgery, to let 
the divine glory ray out from even the common- 
places of life ; we shall be more careful for the 
qualities of things than for the quantities of 
them. The world will grow transparent and 
luminous as the spirit pricks through the mask, 
which we, by our blindness, have forced Na- 
ture to draw across her face, and we shall dwell 
in heaven even while earth holds us to her 
breast. The soul that endures as seeing the 
invisible has already begun to live in the eter- 
nities, and the passing of such a soul will be 
attended by no abrupt changes, but peacefully 
and quietly, as the day shades softly into the 
night, will earth and heaven blend into one. 

" The sunset ebbs down the mountain slopes, 
and village and wilderness fall asleep quietly 
side by side. Twilight touches all growths with 
its chrismal dews. Night softly mothers the 
earth, revealing to us our near and glorious 
companionship of stars, and leaving us to float 
away with them through the solitudes of heaven. 
Home-lights twinkle up from the darkness be- 



92 



THE TEST 



low with a radiance indistinguishable from the 
light of stars. Lifted into the overbrooding 
stillness, we feel only the throbbing of One In- 
finite Heart. All things — all souls of things, 
— are indissolubly one in the Eternal Love. 
Through all the universe there is no longer any 
sigh of separation. 

" So, when for us life's evening hour 

Soft falling shall descend, 
May glory born of earth and heaven 

The earth and heavens blend; — 

" Flooded with peace the spirits float, 

With silent rapture glow, 
Till where earth ends and heaven begins 

The soul shall scarcely know." 



THE GOD OF THE OPEN 



I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains; 
From whence shall my help come? 

Psa. cxxhl. 

In all ages and in all literature, the moun- 
tains have stood for permanence and strength. 
There is a restful assurance about them that 
inspires our faith in their stability. There is 
a sort of friendliness about the mountains, a 
frank, open-hearted kindliness, that disarms sus- 
picion and calls forth the larger and finer im- 
pulses of a man's soul. Who that has followed 
the thin trail as it winds up the mountain-side, 
has not felt the strange spell of a nameless peace 
as he has stood in the silence of the templed 
trees, where even the whistle of a bird seems 
a sacrilege and the crackling of the twigs under 
his feet a profanation? Or who has bared his 
brow to the fresh winds that slip across the 
peaks, and looked down from the morning 
height upon the feverish world, " where little 
men of little minds rise up to eat and sleep 
again," and not felt something of life's big- 
ness sweep across his soul, and something of 
the hidden meaning of it flash upon his spirit? 

93 



94 



THE TEST 



There is a subtle magic in the mountains that 
steals into the human heart and mellows it, 
until it feels its kinship with Nature ; and flower, 
and forest, and chattering brook, and bird, and 
beast, and man seem parts of one inclusive 
Whole and members one of another. There, 
too, if anywhere, in the solitude of the moun- 
tains, the thoughts of men grow holy and the 
soul is purged of its baseness and its low de- 
sires. 

The sea is restless and ever-shifting. It 
dances in tiny wavelets in the morning sun, then 
suddenly bursts into fury, and claws and tears 
itself like a madman. It coaxes and caresses, 
it dimples and smiles, it roars, and dashes, and 
foams, and rages. It whispers soft as a lover, 
and lies quiet and still as a sleeping child, but 
it is always the restless sea, the changeable, 
fickle sea, the wanton and capricious sea. And 
they that go down to the sea in ships sail ever 
in the shadow of a great uncertainty, and are 
glad when from the dim haze of the horizon 
they see the heads of the eternal hills lift them- 
selves in everlasting calm. 

I do not wonder that the ancients regarded 
the mountains as the home of the gods, and 
peopled the peaks with sacred spirits. I think 
I can understand why Zeus held court on old 
Olympus, and how there arose the story of 
Moses ascending mysterious Sinai to find the 



THE GOD OF THE OPEN 95 



tables of stone, written by the finger of the 
Hebrew Jahweh. No one who has ever seen 
the Jungfrau with the Alpine glow upon it, 
burning with a strange red fire long after the 
night had crept into the valleys and wrapped 
the villages that cluster there in darkness and 
gloom, can marvel that to the dwellers on the 
plains the mountains should seem like an altar 
of the Eternal and a meeting-place for the 
immortal gods. 

I think I can understand, too, something of 
David's feeling when, in the midst of his troubled 
life, beaten and bruised in his struggle, and 
wellnigh discouraged by the endless conflict, he 
turned from the great tabernacle with its smok- 
ing altars, its gorgeous priests and its finished 
ritual, which represented the religion of his 
people, and looked away unto the imperturbable 
mountains for a strength and solace he could 
find nowhere else. 

I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains : 
From whence shall my help come? 
My help cometh from the Lord, 
Which made heaven and earth. 

To every free and untrammeled spirit, there 
comes many a season of revolt against the or- 
ganized religion and crystallized cult of his 
day. He seems stifled by the narrowness and 
rigidity of ecclesiasticism. He would leave the 



96 



THE TEST 



pent-up air of the cloisters, heavy with incense, 
and would climb the everlasting hills and drink 
in the golden glory of the morning sun. He 
would exchange the droning of priests for the 
murmur of bees in the open, and the formal 
chanting of choirs for the twitter of birds in 
the woodland. He would add his song to the 
hymn of praise that rises spontaneously from 
the heart of Nature to the great God of Na- 
ture. He would draw down the inspiration 
of his life from the Lord of life, which made 
heaven and earth. 

There are times when the soul stands in the 
midst of all the riches of form and ceremony with 
which the church has adorned its worship, and 
feels its utter poverty of spirit. There are 
seasons when the most complete systems of faith 
and the most perfect theologies are but as the 
dust and chaff of the threshing-floor to the 
starved heart of the God-seeker. There are 
times when there is borne in upon us a strong 
sense of the inadequacy of organized religion, 
as it stands to-day, to satisfy our longings and 
to meet the deepest needs of our life. Our 
heart and our flesh cry out for God, for the 
living God, who is too big to be penned up in 
any temple, or to be the God of any cult or of 
any people. 

I think it was some such feeling as this that 
stirred the breast of the Psalmist, and led him 



THE GOD OF THE OPEN 97 



forth from the artificial thing that represented 
the religion of his day, to find his God in the 
sunlit fields. It was in some such hour, when 
the futility of the gorgeous temple service 
pressed itself upon him, that David turned away 
from it all and lifted his face to the mountains, 
that stood there serene and calm, with their 
unbowed heads reaching up into God's sunshine, 
or piercing the night with their silent peaks, 
and found in their quiet strength and stead- 
fastness a symbol of the Eternal Keeper of 
Israel and the sleepless Watcher over human 
destiny. 

There is that, in this desire for a fresh, free 
access to the fountain head of spiritual ex- 
perience, which appeals to a good many of 
us in these later days. We rebel against that 
doctrine which has held the thought of the 
church for so long, that the truth about di- 
vine things is to be found only in the deliver- 
ances of ecclesiastical councils, and that the In- 
finite can be caught in the net of theological 
definition. We refuse to believe that the God 
of the universe has shut himself up to a single 
mode of revelation and has suffered himself to 
be prisoned within the pages of any book. We 
hear much in these days about the spread of 
atheism and about the disregard of men for the 
church. I do not believe for a single moment 
that the age is growing godless. It cannot 



98 THE TEST 

be denied that there is a revolt against the 
shriveled caricature of God set forth by ec- 
clesiasticism, a God satisfied with the little con- 
ventions of formal worship, with sacrifices, and 
ceremonials, and mechanical repetitions. Men 
are forsaking the God of the sanctuary, and 
the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and 
are laying ahold heartily of the living God, 
who dwelleth not in temples made with hands. 
The movement of the present day is not an in- 
dication of an indifference of men for spiritual 
things, but a reflection upon the adequacy of 
the old methods and the old modes of think- 
ing. 

There is a tendency, now-a-days, to test our 
theories, as Whitman tested his poems, by ut- 
tering them in the open air. We bring them 
forth from the hot atmosphere of the schools, 
and try them out under the blue sky, where the 
winds blow and the light is white and clear. 
We are not seeking truth to-day in the dim re- 
ligious twilight that filters through stained 
minster windows, nor do we try to kindle the 
torch of knowledge at the flickering candles that 
burn upon the silent altars. We are living out 
of doors, in these days, and in a world that is 
saturated with God. Coleridge has voiced the 
sentiment of many of us to-day, in his sonnet, 
" To Nature." 



THE GOD OF THE OPEN 99 



It may indeed be phantasy when I 

Essay to draw from all created things 

Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings; 

And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie 

Lessons of love and earnest piety. 

So let it be; and if the wide world rings 

In mock of this belief, to me it brings 

Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity. 

So will I build my altar in the fields, 
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, 
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields 
Shall be the only incense I will yield to Thee, 
Thee only God! and Thou shalt not despise 
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice. 

We find everywhere to-day a steady, persist- 
ent movement away from organized forms of re- 
ligion and set modes of worship. There is noth- 
ing to alarm us or to make us fearful in this 
movement. It is both wholesome and health- 
ful. It is the operation, in the religious world, 
of the same spirit which produced the human- 
istic revolution, and rescued art and education 
from the chilling, cramping atmosphere of the 
cloister. It is a recrudescence of the elemental 
instinct in all fine, free souls, that makes the 
universe God's temple and all life a worship. 
It draws no lines of boundary, to mark off the 
limits of God's activity, or to fix the frontier 
of divine revelation, but it sees a theophany in 



100 



THE TEST 



every flower and every common bush afire with 
God. Every place is a holy place, and it finds 

Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing. 

There are those who look upon the present 
tendency to " return to Nature 99 as a species 
of paganism, and the joyous, simple trust in 
the God of the open fields as a sort of heresy 
or an apostasy from the faith. But we turn 
from their feverish debates and sapless argu- 
ments about the being and attribute of God, and 
about atonements, and justifications, and modes 
of worship, and forms, and ceremonies, and, 
like the Psalmist of old, we lift our eyes unto 
the mountains and go God-seeking amid the 
work of God's own hands. As Wordsworth 
cried in the weariness of his soul: 

Great God! I'd rather be 

A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn: 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 

Call it paganism, if you will, there is little in 
names after all, but the fact is that it is only 
an emergence from the treadmill routine of ec- 
clesiasticism, with its peddling conventions and 
its false emphases, into the infinite sweep of 



THE GOD OF THE OPEN 101 

things, where day unto day uttereth speech and 
night unto night showeth knowledge. It is an 
exchange of the written law of man for the un- 
written law of the Lord, which God has woven 
into the heart of things, and which, when found, 
maketh wise the simple, rejoiceth the heart, en- 
lighteneth the eyes, and endureth forever. We 
prefer to believe that the God of the universe 
reveals himself in the mind of man and in the 
processes of Nature more than in any book or 
in any institution. 

The attitude of David toward the organized 
religion of his day, though it may have repre- 
sented only a momentary outburst of senti- 
ment, a temporary elevation of soul above the 
smoke and incense of the altar, appeals to us 
very strongly as Unitarians. We do not stand 
for freedom from worship, though we have 
often been accused of it, but we stand for free- 
dom in worship. We are not willing to be bound 
down by any hard and fast rules as to what 
we shall believe. We claim a right to a free 
faith. We have grown weary of the everlast- 
ing jangle over creeds and confession, we are 
tired of the stilted jargon of the schools. If 
we turn away from these things as inadequate 
and of small moment compared with the big 
things of God and Man, it is because these 
petty devices cannot satisfy the longings and 
yearnings of our hearts, nor the aspirations 



102 THE TEST 

of our spirits. We are seeking a God who can- 
not be coaxed to live in little temples of mor- 
tar and stone, nor shut into revelations made 
to a single people or in a single book. We 
are looking for the God of the Universe, 
and we believe that the place to find him 
is in the Universe itself. We insist, there- 
fore, on being allowed to go out alone, un- 
accompanied by priest or prelate, to find him 
for whom our soul longeth, under the stars of 
night, and in the blue of noon, when silence 
sits upon the mountain-tops, and the finite loses 
itself in the Infinite. We do not claim any 
special revelation. We simply bow our heads 
before the 

" Something that we name and cannot know/' 
and trust the " Eternal Goodness." To those 
who would question us, we reply in the simple 
words of Whittier: 

" I trace your lines of argument; 

Your logic linked and strong, 
I weigh as one who dreads dissent, 

And fears a doubt as wrong. 

" But still my human hands are weak 

To hold your iron creeds: 
Against the words ye bid me speak 

My heart within me pleads. 

"Who fathoms the Eternal Thought? 
Who talks of scheme and plan? 



THE GOD OF THE OPEN 103 



The Lord is God ! He needeth not 
The poor device of man. 

" I walk with bare, hushed feet the ground 

Ye tread with boldness shod; 
I dare not fix with mete and bound 

The love and power of God." 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 



Every religion, no matter what its form, 
lays claim to a most substantial authority. All 
faiths have their final standard to which are 
referred all matters of belief and practice for 
determination. The search for an infallible 
norm of belief and conduct arises from a va- 
riety of motives. It may be due to a genuine 
desire to know the truth with certainty, to pos- 
sess a place of refuge from the tormenting pur- 
suit of doubt. It may grow out of a wish to 
be free from the labor incident upon forming 
our own moral judgments, or out of an attempt 
to shift moral responsibility from our own 
shoulders to some external authority. It is 
much easier to get our morals ready-made. At 
any rate, we see men everywhere casting about 
for some infallible rule of faith and practice, 
for some sort of religious yard-stick, by which 
they may take the moral measure of things. 
The effort seems to be less to secure spiritual 
insight and moral discernment than to find some 
mechanical contrivance to take their place,— 
some outside oracle, some automatic conscience. 
These attempts to secure an infallible stand- 
104 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 105 



ard have resulted in locating supreme religious 
authority either in the Church, as do the Ro- 
manists ; or in the Bible, as do the Protestants ; 
or in reason, as do the rationalists. Some 
thinkers would find the source of authority in 
all three. That there must be some place 
whence issues a moral imperative scarcely needs 
argument. That there must be a forum some- 
where to pronounce moral judgments, every man 
who believes in the existence of a moral order 
must admit. But where? Where is the seat 
of religious authority? Conceding that the 
Church is possessed of authority, is the au- 
thority infallible? To which church does it be- 
long? Does infallibility lie with the Bible 
rather than with the Church, or with reason 
rather than with the Church or Bible, or with 
all three? Which is the infallible source of doc- 
trine and discipline? 

The determination of the question is much 
simplified by a consideration that is usually 
overlooked, namely, that in the very nature of 
things there can be no infallible authority y 
either in a corporation, a literature, or in pure 
reason. History is too full of the mistakes of 
church courts and ecclesiastical councils to jus- 
tify any serious mind in yielding to that great 
corporate body an absolute inerrancy. The old 
dictum that whatever is held by all the church, 
always, and everywhere, must be true, has re- 



10 6 THE TEST 

ceived too many staggering set-backs to be of 
any value, save as a sort of theological curio. 
The charred bones of the martyrs, who were 
first cauterized and then canonized, are a poor 
argument for the infallibility of the church. 
The mere aggregation of ecclesiastics m con- 
ference may give greater plausibility to their 
deliverances, by reason of the consensus of 
opinion, but it does not invest those deliver- 
ances with the slightest degree of infallibility. 
The church vehemently asserted that the sun 
revolves around the earth, and this declaration 
was believed by all the church, everywhere, and 
had been believed for all time; but, while this 
emphatic assertion may have served the ques- 
tionable purpose of detecting heretics, it had 
no appreciable effect on the facts of the celes- 
tial economy. Whenever the church, in any 
age, has arrogated to herself infallibility, and 
has insisted on the absolute inerrancy of her 
dogmatic positions, she has had to recede from 
those positions over and over again; and yet, 
with a strange inconsistency, she has often 
Yielded the specific point at issue, and has gone 
on calmly maintaining her infallibility. Truth 
flows into the thought and life of the world 
through human channels. The great prophets 
have been men of like passions with the rest 
of us — otherwise they could not have been 
prophets. It does not affect the limitations of 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 107 



a man to be chosen as the vehicle through which 
some great truth utters itself. No truth, there- 
fore, gets into human life that does not par- 
take of the liabilities of the human agent 
through which it finds expression. All revela- 
tion is partial and incomplete. This fact, as 
Dr. Martineau has well said, " will surprise no 
one who remembers that in the weaving of his- 
tory two agents are inseparable partners; and 
that where the pattern is most divine, the web 
that bears it must still be human. Whatever 
higher inspiration visits our world must use our 
nature as its organ, must take the mold of our 
receptive capacity and mingle with the exist- 
ing life of thought and affection. How, then, 
can it both assume their form and escape their 
limitations? How flow into the current of our 
minds without being diluted there? How dis- 
solve itself in them without any taint from their 
impurity? You cannot receive the light on a 
refracting surface, and yet expect it to pursue 
its way still straight and colorless. And the 
soul of a man, especially of one fit to be among 
the prophets of the world, is not like a crystal, 
a dead medium of transmission, which once for 
all deflects what it receives and has done with 
it; but a living agent whose faculties seize on 
every influence that falls upon them, with ac- 
tion intenser as the appeal is more awakening. 
If in your silent musings some deep word of God 



108 THE TEST 

should come to you, some tone of tender and 
solemn conviction, lifting you and placing you 
where you had never been before, would you 
not think of it? Would you not adjust its 
place with the faiths that were dearest to you 
before? Would it not run up into every love 
and hope that you have, and flow from your lips 
in their speech and pass into your life in their 
guise ? Instead of suspending your natural fac- 
ulties and coming out of them as it went in, it 
would but quicken reason, imagination, affec- 
tion, and multiply their combinations yet with- 
out affecting their resources. The flash of 
vision which bursts into the mind may be itself 
a light from heaven ; but it can only illuminate 
the scene on which it falls ; and, while it pierces 
every recess, it does but touch with glory what 
already lies around, the thoughts and admira- 
tions which furnish the chamber of the soul, 
and the far-stretching ideals which spread as 
the night-field beyond the windows of her home. 
Come "whence it' may, from Nature or from 
Grace, new truth, once committed to the mind, 
falls into fallible custody ; and the more it pos- 
sesses the soul, the more will it be worked into 
the tissue of prior conceptions, retintmg their 
imagery, reasoned into their theory, flung into 
the forms of their language: so that it cannot 
even issue at first hand from the inspired 
prophet himself, except on the intellectual air 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 109 



of his time and in the dialect of his people or 
of his school." 

This same blending of the divine and the 
limited human is found in the Bible. In the 
very nature of things the Bible cannot be in- 
fallible. Nor can any other book or system of 
books. For, if we are to have an infallible lit- 
erature, we must have along with it, in order 
to make the revelation infallible, an infallible 
language, an infallible interpreter, and an in- 
fallible listener. Let inerrancy fail at any one 
point, and the result is a partial and incomplete 
revelation. Now, no book was ever written that 
has given rise to so many divergent theories, 
opinions and beliefs as the Bible. No two sects 
agree in their interpretation, nor do any two 
men, anywhere in Christendom, coincide in their 
religious views, each of whom bases his theology 
on Holy Writ. If, then, the Bible is infallible, 
its infallibility is of little practical worth to the 
world, apart from an infallible interpreter and 
language, — which we do not possess. The 
Bible is God's book for man, written with a 
man's pen and in a man's tongue. Out of its 
pages divine truth flashes and flames, kindling 
the souls of men into a holy fire. From prophet 
and psalmist and gospeller there come divine 
voices, appealing to the best there is in us, 
and awakening hopes that are eternal. And a 
spirit quivers and pulses in the book that 



110 



THE TEST 



touches the heart of the world with a strange 
power, and makes for a larger and truer life. 
Of making many books there is no end. The 
world is full of volumes through which the 
thought of man has tried to utter itself. Like 
the leaves of the forest when autumn has come, 
these books have fluttered down into a name- 
less oblivion. There are some works that have 
resisted the tooth of time, and there are some 
examples of modern literature which, to in- 
dividuals, speak with greater power than any- 
thing in the Bible. But, as Dr. James Drum- 
mond puts it, " it remains to be seen whether 
such writings will wear, whether they will last 
through the centuries and spread over many 
lands and be cherished among rich and poor, 
learned and unlearned, as a source of life and 
healing. There are a few works, such as the 
Confessions of Augustine, the Imitation, and 
the Pilgrim's Progress, which have stood the 
test of permanence and wide diffusion; but all 
these bear witness to the Bible, and are only the 
fruitful branches of the vine, the roots of 
which go down into Hebrew prophecy and the 
teaching of Christ and his apostles. We can- 
not reverse the facts of history and glorify the 
works of Emerson and Carlyle with the blood 
of martyrs, the faithfulness of confessors, the 
victorious purity of unnumbered saints and the 
hallelujahs of ten thousand churches. And 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 111 



strange as it may appear to those who are under 
the influence of reaction, it is simply the fact, 
that on the Christian soul, in its anguish of 
sorrow or sin, the words of the Bible drop as 
with the power of God ; and it listens entranced, 
as though the heavens were opened, and the 
Father's voice spoke to the very trial of the 
moment." It is not the Bible that is to be 
given up, but that theory of universal inspira- 
tion, which places Esther on a level with Isaiah, 
and exalts a page of imprecations to the rank 
of the Sermon on the Mount. 

But is there no source of authority in re- 
ligious things? There most assuredly is, but 
it is not an infallible authority. For the soul 
that is truly alive, there is no Delphic Oracle, 
there are no Sibylline Leaves, there is no holy 
place anywhere, to which one may go to find a 
truth unmixed with human liability. The pil- 
grim to the sacred shrine bears in his own 
bosom a limitation from which he cannot es- 
cape. The truth that comes to him is bounded 
by his own capacity, and he spells out the mes- 
sage in the alphabet of his own experience. It 
must be so. No matter what theory one may 
hold as to the authority of the Church or Book, 
as a matter of fact the ultimate authority lies 
elsewhere. We come to the deliverances of the 
Church and to the Bible with a discrimination, 
with a faculty of moral and spiritual judgment, 



112 THE TEST 

which, in spite of our theories, passes upon the 
divine value of the things found. In all our 
experience we submit everything that comes 
within the range of our life to three ultimate 
tests : physical things we try by physical rules, 
intellectual propositions we test by reason, and 
moral questions we submit to conscience. No 
one of these tests gives us an infallible result, 
but they are the best we have, and, for that 
reason, must be for us our final authority. 
However much we may claim to attribute an in- 
fallible authority to the Bible, yet, in our in- 
terpretation of it, it is our reason and our 
moral sense that determine what we do really 
get from it. No man can hold to the dogma 
of plenary inspiration, and retain his moral 
sanity or his intellectual integrity. Claim for 
the Bible inerrancy, if you will, but no man can 
believe that a passage like this: "Blessed is 
he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against 
a rock," or the fearful imprecations of the 
109th Psalm, are inspired of God, that is, in- 
spired of a God that is worthy a decent man's 
respect. "The religious idea of God must 
claim, and justify itself to, the highest known 
morality, and no amount of authority, eccle- 
siastical or civil, will make men worship an im- 
moral God. And already that truth has thrown 
its light back upon questions of Old Testament 
morality. We no longer say, ' It is in the Bible, 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 113 



approved or allowed of God, and therefore must 
be right.' It is this view which, in every age, 
has given its protection to religious wars, and 
intolerance, and persecution." 

The truth uttered in the Bible,— and there 
is a vast treasure of it, — has come down to us 
hampered by human limitation, colored by hu- 
man prejudice and tainted by human imperfec- 
tion. In order to get the truth that is bedded 
in the book, we must appeal past the letter of 
it to the spirit that attests itself to our own 
better selves,— and to that spirit only. For, 
after all is said, it is the man himself who is the 
final authority, not the Church or the book. 
The man gets from each no more than he brings 
spiritual eyes to see and spiritual ears to hear. 
However much we may seek an outside au- 
thority, located in a corporate body, a book, 
or in a confession of faith, yet, in very deed 
and truth, the ultimate appeal is not to these 
things, but to the organ of spiritual sense, 
through which each man of us interprets these 
various symbols for himself. We may claim 
adherence to an external rule, but as a matter 
of fact our appeal is to our own reading of the 
moral law, written on the tablets of our own 
conscience. Creeds, confessions, Bibles, even 
the idea of God that men would make us believe 
in, are summoned before the bar of our spiritual 
judgment, and all that falls below the highest 



H4, THE TEST 

level of our moral thinking we reject, no matter 
how many ecclesiastical councils may have de- 
clared it or how many sacred books have lent 
their sanction to it. 

It may be urged at this point, that such a 
throwing of a man back upon his own spiritual 
sense for his moral truths, or at least for final 
judgment upon moral truths, is a dangerous in- 
dependence fraught with many an evil. Dan- 
gerous or not, it is the best we have. Better 
the most imperfect moral judgment, where a 
man honestly uses his spiritual discernment and 
exercises the highest faculty of his soul, than 
any limp acquiescence in dogmatic formulas, 
however well-knit their logic, where the spirit 
slumbers and the conscience is denied full and 
independent play. Let us have those who think 
with us, but never those who think for us. 
Borrow another man's fire,— that we must 
usually do — but burn your own torch. That 
is what it was given you for. 

No authority in religious matters can be in- 
fallible. But the truest insight a man can get 
comes to him when, with a great hunger and 
thirst after righteousness, he appeals past the 
churches, past the books, and past the creeds,— 
all of them man-made,— to the divine spirit 
that temples in every sincere soul. It may be 
asked whether these conclusions drawn even 
from a quickened spiritual vision will not be 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 115 



diverse? Is there any guarantee of unanimity? 
No, no more than there is in the inter- 
pretation of an external authority. I point 
simply to the hundred sects of Christen- 
dom, each based on the translation of a phrase 
of tTie Bible, the shading of a vowel or the cross- 
ing of a " t," and remark that there could 
scarcely be more diversity than at present. 
But will not this inward monitor be wrong 
often? Yes, wrong often and imperfect always. 
Wrong because of the bents and prejudices and 
passions of men ; imperfect because of the limi- 
tations of human capacity. But are the bents 
and prejudices and passions eliminated, are the 
limitations incident upon our very humanness 
removed, when we pass from making judgments 
upon our highest spiritual experiences to the 
making of judgments upon the deliverances of 
an ecclesiastical council or upon the exact mean- 
ing of a Hebrew verb or a Greek tense? Are 
the judgments passed upon a book or a creed, 
fashioned in language that must be ambiguous 
and open to as many interpretations as there 
are readers, are these judgments, I say, less 
liable to error than the judgments formed in 
a man's soul when his spirit receives upon it 
the touch of God's spirit? 

No one more appreciated the worth of a man's 
power of moral discrimination than did Jesus. 
He was all the time throwing his hearers back 



116 THE TEST 

on their own critical faculty. He stated his 
case and forced a moral judgment. He in- 
sisted in pressing back of all literalism to the 
spirit of things. In making his own moral de- 
cisions, he did not appeal to the letter of Scrip- 
ture, but he tested the letter by the spiritual 
monitor that sits within the soul of every man 
of us. When a certain lawyer came to him with 
a test question involving a matter of ethics, 
Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, and 
then turning to the questioner he set him 
squarely in front of a moral judgment: 
" Which of these two thinkest THOU was neigh- 
bor to him that fell among the thieves? " He 
did not hold the attorney to some quibble of 
the book, but he made him bring the point at 
issue to the bar of his own spiritual discrimina- 
tion. And when the man had made his de- 
cision, Jesus confirmed the judgment. When, 
on one occasion, Jesus had broken the letter of 
the law respecting Sabbath observance, and the 
officials of the church had taken him to task 
for it, Jesus, in his defense, appealed past the 
written law to that higher law that is woven into 
the very fiber of our being. He did not say, 
"Is it written thus and so?" but he did say, 
" Is it lawful to do good or evil on the Sab- 
bath day?" Lawful by what code? By the 
statutes of conscience, by the code that every 
man carries graven into his moral nature. 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 117 



The whole effort of Jesus was not to bring men 
into subjection to a corporate body, or in bond- 
age to a literature, but to secure for them spirit- 
ual liberty. He would unbind their souls, set 
them upon their feet, and loose their spiritual 
powers. 

This perception of moral values is the highest 
faculty of the human soul. This inner vision, 
this spiritual intuition, this ability to discern 
good and evil, this special sense for knowing 
God at first hand, is not the exclusive preroga- 
tive of church councils or of the compilers of 
theological formulas. It is the pearl of great 
price, which the least man of us possesses, or 
may possess if he will. For there is a spiritual 
sense. Like a musical sense, men have it in 
varying degrees. In spite of materialistic 
sneers, moral intuition exists. The soul is or- 
ganized for spiritual knowledge, and that 
knowledge comes to it in many ways. Have 
you never noticed, as you have gone sing- 
ing about the room, and have suddenly broken 
off in the midst of a note, how the string 
of the instrument near you, piano, harp, 
guitar, took up the broken tone and sung it 
back to you? Not every string would answer, 
but only that which was tuned to the same 
note. The vibration of your voice called out a 
sympathetic vibration in the string. So in 
every rudest life there is something that answers 



118 THE TEST 

to the heavenly voices, and in the great heart 
of the Infinite Life there is a chord that sings 
its answer to every call of the human soul 
It may be but a monotone that our little life 
gives forth, a trembling, feeble monotone, but 
as it cries out its dull note there comes back to 
the listening soul a divine response. For, 

" Even in savage bosoms 
There are strivings, yearnings, longings, 
For the good they comprehend not; 
And the feeble hands and helpless, 
Groping blindly in the darkness, 
Touch God's right hand in the darkness 
And are lifted up and strengthened. 

There is no need of media, or agencies, to 
bring the wistful soul into the presence of the 
Eternal. It was a wonderful picture that John 
gave us, as he dreamed in Patmos' solitude, of 
fhe Holy City, the city that lieth four-square^ 
The walls of the city of God faced north and 
east and south and west, and each was pierced by 
a triple *ate, that was never shut. It is a very 
LautiM vision of a great, comforting truth 
that wherever a man may be, in all God s earth 
he can go from where he is straight up through 
the welcoming gate into the presence of God. 
The Bible may be a lamp unto our feet and a 
light unto our path, the voice of priest or of 
pastor, even the deliverances of churches, may 



AUTHORITY IN RELIGION 119 



serve to guide us in the way; but better than 
all, and higher than all, is the passing of a soul, 
for itself, into the presence of the Infinite Spirit, 
that is not far from any one of us at any time. 

Wherever a soul has spiritual ears to hear, 
the deep of God's life calls ever unto the deep 
of man's life. It is said that on the shores of 
the Adriatic, the wives of the fishermen go down 
to the sea at dusk, and, as the night shuts in, 
they sing to the murmuring waters their folk- 
songs and hymns. Then they listen, — and 
presently the darkness replies with the same 
familiar words in the voices of the fathers, sing- 
ing their loving answer out of the heart of the 
shadow. Then the mothers go home again to 
their hearth-stone, with the music still croon- 
ing in their bosom. But the bustling life of 
the town goes on, and none hear the love-song 
from the sea, save they that are homesick for 
it, — and listen. Even so does God's truth 
come into the world,— a still, small voice, sing- 
ing its way through the dark, a love-song for 
the listeners, a gospel for the homesick. 



TO AN UNKNOWN GOD 



Acts xvii:23. 



Athens! The very name opens. the tombs 
of countless centuries and calls forth Art's 
mighty dead ; the keen mind of the philosopher, 
who grappled with the great problems of being 
and thought his way toward the light, awakens 
from its long slumber; and the tongue of Elo- 
quence, molded to dust ages agone, trembles 
again down the still corridors of time. Modern 
Greece? There is no modern Greece. As Met- 
ternich once said of Italy, it is only a " geo- 
graphical expression," a quantity negligible m 
the affairs of the modern world. Who thinks 
of Greece to-day but as the home of an ancient 
glory and the seat of a departed worth? At 
the mere mention of Athens, the mind forgets 
the intervening years, and, building anew the 
crumbling ruins of temple and theater and mar- 
ket place, it peoples them again with the Im- 
mortals of the past. Homer and Pindar, Soph- 
ocles and ^schylus, Phidias and Praxiteles, 
Plato and Aristotle, Thucydides and Herodotus, 
with the multitude of the great in literature and 

120 



TO AN UNKNOWN GOD 121 



art and philosophy, in poetry and the drama, 
in politics and history surge through the an- 
cient streets. Again does Socrates teach morals 
to the Grecian youth, and the blood leaps 
afresh at the ringing sentences of Pericles and 
Demosthenes. And the gods of Greece come 
back to their deserted altars, the fires burn 
anew at the shrines of Zeus, and Hera, and 
Hermes, and the god of War, while Orpheus 
breathes again into his singing pipes, and old 
Poseidon trumpets from the wrinkled sea. For 
the moment, beguiled by the subtle touch of 
memory, we forget that Athens, 

" the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
And eloquence/' 

is dead, and that the gods, whose statues 
thronged her Pantheon, have also 

" passed and gone with a vanished age." 

Time makes few distinctions. Like a sight- 
less beast it gnaws at the roots of things, 
caring nothing for human values and human 
estimates. How many civilizations have set 
themselves proudly in the earth and flung their 
banners to the wanton winds ; have builded their 
temples and pierced the blue sky with towering 
monuments, and then, like a spluttering candle 
that burns low in its socket, have gone out in 
darkness and in night? 



12 2 THE TEST 

" I met a traveler from an antique land 
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things, 
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed: 
And on the pedestal these words appear: 
' My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair ! ' 
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare ^ 
The lone and level sands stretch far away." 

No form of culture, or of cult, bears within 
itself a guarantee of immortality. Philosophies 
and religions, with all the myriad hosts that 
nourished them, have one after another been 
buried by the drift of years. The gods and 
their worshipers alike have lain down together 
in a common grave. Where now is the great 
Zeus, or what has happened to the power of 
Jupiter, at whose nod the earth trembled and 
the seas piled up their waves? In vain do we 
look for Ahura Mazda, and the might of Am- 
nion has become a myth. 

Wandering through the statue-studded streets 
of Athens, Paul, the preacher and prophet of a 
new cult, chanced upon a shrine dedicated to a 
god whose very name had slipped from the mem- 
ory of man. The eager, restless souls of a 



TO AN UNKNOWN GOD 123 



later age, striving to find a satisfaction for the 
yearning of the human spirit, had kindled again 
the fires upon the ancient altar and had graven 
upon its crumbling side the inscription: TO 
AN UNKNOWN GOD. How vain was their 
effort the subsequent history of the world has 
abundantly proven, for the gods that they then 
knew, and the god whom they did not know, have 
vanished together. For nothing human, neither 
its institutions nor its conceptions of God, can 
escape the inexorable mortality which has 
marked them for its own. Even the gods die. 
And the God of Paul, the God of Moses, the 
God of Jesus, shall He, too, die? 

I suppose that it is a distinctive mark of 
every age, to look upon its own philosophy and 
its own theories of things as the final flowering 
of human thought. But Time, which dispels 
many an illusion, has never yet set a seal upon 
the mind of man, nor erected barriers beyond 
which research may not penetrate. The path 
of human progress is strewn thick with the 
wrecks of many a cast-off creed and of many 
an outworn philosophy. " Doubtless," said 
Count D'Alviella, " the world may still witness 
many philosophic revolutions and reactions. 
If we may read the future in the past, religions 
may yet follow and replace each other; forms 
of worship may arise as different from ours as 
the synagogue was from the temple, or the 



124 THE TEST 

churches of the early Christians from the pagan 
sanctuaries. Attributes which many of us re- 
gard as essential to the Deity may be canceled 
by the theological system which shall gain the 
ascendant. We or our children may have to 
relinquish many a cherished conception of the 
action of God and the destiny of man. Nay, 
"God" may die, as his known and unknown 
predecessors — the Baalim and the Teotl, As- 
sur and Ammon, Odin and Jupiter, have died; 
as his contemporaries of to-day, the Brahm of 
Hindustan, the Allah of Islam, Ormuzd " Lord 
Omniscient," Thian "the Celestial Emperor, 
and even Yahweh " The Holy One of Israel 
shall one dav die; but what cannot die is the 
conception, enshrined in these names, of a mys- 
terious and superhuman Power, realizing him- 
self in all the laws of the known universe, re- 
vealing himself to man in the voice of conscience 
and the spectacle of the world. 

" Here we have the truth which will remain 
when it has freed the conception of the Deity 
from all the confusions which originally covered 
it, and the parasitical accretions which have 
since laid hold of it; when it has stripped off, as 
so many borrowed plumes, anthropomorphic at- 
tributes and moral limitations, and has set forth 
the existence of deity as Unity and the action 
of deity as Harmony. Here, then, we stand at 
last before the impenetrable veil which will ever 



TO AN UNKNOWN GOD 125 



separate the Deity, in its grandeur and its 
majesty, from our eyes, but which does not cut 
off either the manifestations of its power or 
the revelations of its law, or, may be, even the 
mysterious radiation of an attractive force 
answering to our terms of sympathy and love." 

There is a truth, a mighty truth, which we, 
bound by our little iron creeds, are very apt 
to miss : that God is greater than any thought 
of him which our weak philosophies may hold at 
any time. 

"Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be ; 

They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they/ 5 

Poor fools that we are, not to see that the 
dead gods are only the dead thoughts of men, 
names of a passing and temporary conception 
of the imperishable Soul of Things, whose big- 
ness refuses to be snared in the meshes of our 
philosophy. The deserted altars of the old 
deities are the mile-stones of human advance- 
ment. The ancient divinities fade before the 
fresh glimpses which the human spirit gets of 
the white radiance of the Eternal. The world 
climbs upward, and its horizon broadens at 
every step. In the course of time men must 
leave the shrines of former gods behind them 
and push steadily on. There is an evolution of 



126 THE TEST 

ideas and of ideals, as well as of things and of 
institutions, and the "thoughts of men are 
widened with the process of the suns." For 
every new idea an old idea must perish, and new 
ideals dig the graves of their predecessors. 
Life is born of death, and the living God of any 
age builds his altars on the ruins of the dead 
gods of the past. 

A noted German has written a sentence that 
is frequently quoted: " So wie die Volker sich 
bessern, bessern sich auch ihre Gotter." As 
peoples improve, so do their gods improve also. 
Man grows with the growth of his aims and with 
his growth grow the gods. The gods of men 
are made out of the highest values with which 
men have become acquainted in their own ex- 
perience. It must be so. We have no terms 
in which to think or in which to record our con- 
ceptions of moral worth save such as we have 
derived from our own struggle for existence. 
" Values must ever be discovered and produced 
in the world of experience before they can be 
conceived or assumed to exist in a higher world. 
The other world must always be derived from 
this world: it can never be a primary concept. 
It changes with the changes of this world. The 
content of religion always points back to life 
in the world of experience, and without a knowl- 
edge of this life would be incomprehensible." 
Each age evolves its own God, and it creates 



TO AN UNKNOWN GOD 127 



him out of its own fine ideals of goodness and 
beauty and truth. We of this Twentieth Cen- 
tury do not worship the God of our fathers. 
We have left the God of Abraham and of Isaac 
and of Jacob, the God of Jesus and of Paul and 
of Calvin, aye, the God of yesterday, behind 
us and are clutching for ourselves at the skirts 
of the Infinite. We are making our thought of 
God correspond to our own daily experience. 
The God of Abraham was the God of Abraham. 
The God of Calvin was the God of Calvin. 
But the God of to-day is larger than the finest 
thought of all the past, and is the reflection of 
the holiest conceptions of the modern world. 
As Browning puts it, 

" In man's self arise 
August anticipations, symbols, types 
Of a dim splendor ever on before 
In that eternal circle life pursues. 
For men begin to pass their nature's bound, 
And find new hopes and cares which fast supplant 
Their proper joys and griefs; they grow too great 
For narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fade 
Before the unmeasured thirst for good." 

The God of Abraham and of Moses and of 
Calvin is dead, the narrow-minded cruel God 
of a narrow-minded and cruel age, and we of 
to-day, while we still retain the name " God," 
have nevertheless grasped the old and " sorry 



128 THE TEST 

scheme of things" and have "remoulded it 
nearer to our heart's desire." 

The conception of every age is only the se- 
rious attempt of our limited human mind to 
comprehend the Infinite. This attempt, in the 
very nature of things, must always result in 
partial and imperfect ideas, blind gropings after 
the 

" Somewhat that we name and cannot know, 
Ev'n as we name a star and only see 
His quenchless flashings forth, which ever show 
And ever hide Him, and which are not He." 

Timid souls are sometimes fearful lest faith 
is dying out of human life, and they think they 
hear 

"It's melancholy, long-withdrawing roar 

Retreating, to the breath 
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 

And naked shingles of the world." 

But in very truth there never was a time in 
the long history of human kind when faith was 
keener or more insistent. Faith in God, in the 
living, growing God, saturates the thought of 
men. That men no longer believe in the old 
conceptions is no proof that they have no larger 
and truer conceptions of their own. "I be- 
lieve in God." That is the heart of the world's 
credo to-day, but further than that they refuse 



TO AN UNKNOWN GOD 129 



to go, to make the God of the larger life of the 
world identical with the pinched and inadequate 
conception of ages long since dead. Each civ- 
ilization makes for itself its own God, and that 
God lives only as long as the civilization which 
created it. Zeus and Ammon, Yahweh and the 
God of the Middle Ages are dead because the 
systems that begot them have perished from 
the earth. Why should we cling to the vanished 
past, why should we limit our expanding minds 
to the petty stage of our father's and our 
father's father's, when for us to-day 

" Earth's crammed with heaven 
And every common bush afire with God? " 

We do not deny the existence of the Eternal 
when we refuse to accept the conceptions which 
a long past age has held of him. It is not the 
God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob 
that our souls long for, but the God of the liv- 
ing present, who calls to our souls out of the 
ruck and the confusion of life, and whose spirit, 
quivering in all that touches our daily expe- 
rience, speaks to us in the language of our own 
hearts' daily needs. Each in his own tongue 
hears the whisper of God, his God, and not an- 
other's. 

" A fire-mist and a planet, 
A crystal and a cell, 



130 



THE TEST 



A saurian and a jelly-fish, 

And a cave where the cave-men dwell; 

Then a sense of law and beauty, 

And a face turned from the clod — 

Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it — God. 

" A mist on the far horizon, 
The infinite, tender sky, 
The rich, ripe tints of the cornfield, 
And wild geese sailing high; 
And all over upland and lowland 
The charm of the golden-rod — 
Some of us call it Autumn, 
And others call it — God. 

" Like tides on a crescent sea-beach, 
When the moon is new and thin, 
Into our hearts high yearnings 
Come welling and surging in,— 
Come from that mystic ocean 
Whose rim no foot has trod — 
home of us call it Longing, 
And others call it — God. 

" A picket frozen on duty, 

A mother starved for her brood, 

Socrates drinking the hemlock, 

And Jesus on the rood; 

And millions who, humble and nameless, 

The hard, straight pathway plod — 

Some call it Consecration,^ 

And others call it — God." 



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